Today's Top Stories Verizon (NYSE: VZ) continues to battle a raft of copper wiring theft in Pittsburgh's North Side neighborhood. The telco is offering a $50,000 reward for information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of who is responsible. In recent years, the telco has reported about 20 incidents in Pittsburgh alone. Over the last two months it had three or four cases of theft, with the most recent on Nov. 11 on Royal Street. "These spates of thefts have been in the Pittsburgh area recently, but we've seen them throughout Verizon's footprint from Pennsylvania all the way through California," said Lee Gierczynski, spokesperson for Verizon, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The biggest concern Verizon has is the impact these incidents have on public safety because they cause unnecessary phone outages for potentially hundreds or thousands of customers." Gierczynski said that these incidents are "unique because they're right in the city limits so it's an urban area." Over 2,000 feet of copper cable have been stolen. Although the thefts did not cause problems for a large amount of customers, they collectively caused $400,000 worth of damage to its network. The telco said the majority of the incidents took place on Gershon, Nublock and Royal streets. Although he could not elaborate, Gierczynski said they have taken other security measures to prevent new thefts and are working with state and local law enforcement to find the perpetrators. "We have taken steps with law enforcement to minimize the chances of this happening again," Gierczynski said. "There are different tactics we're taking, but obviously we are not detailing them." The North side of Pittsburgh is just one area where the telco is seeing copper theft. In April, the telco offered $50,000 for information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of anyone who has stolen copper cable in Lawrence and Washington Counties. Copper theft has been an ongoing problem for incumbent telcos. Besides Verizon, AT&T (NYSE: T), FairPoint (Nasdaq: FRP), Frontier (Nasdaq: FTR) and Windstream (Nasdaq: WIN) have been waging wars on copper theft. State lawmakers are assisting in the copper theft fight. Five states--West Virginia, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, and Washington--have developed laws to help curb copper theft. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
West Virginia copper theft law seems to be working--for some
AT&T strikes back against copper theft in Phoenix with $5K reward offer
FairPoint fights copper theft in its New England territory
Windstream steps up copper theft battle in Oklahoma with $25K reward Read more about: Verizon
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CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has added another element to its growing cloud services portfolio by acquiring Tier 3, a Seattle-based public cloud service provider. Neither company revealed the financial terms of the deal. Building on its earlier acquisition of Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider AppFog, the telco will use Tier 3's products, roadmap and vision as the foundation of its cloud strategy and anchor the new Seattle-based CenturyLink Cloud Development Center. Under the terms of the agreement, Jared Wray, the founder and chief technology officer for Tier 3, will now serve as chief technology officer for the CenturyLink Cloud organization and lead the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center. This acquisition will provide benefits to both companies. CenturyLink will gain necessary cloud development resources, while Tier 3 will be able to extend its service sets over the telco's growing global network and data center footprint. Leveraging Tier 3's public, multi-tenant cloud, the new CenturyLink Cloud offer includes a self-service interface to create and manage public cloud environments. In addition, a Web services API and Cloud Foundry-based PaaS will provide a cloud application toolkit for enterprise developers. Acquiring Tier 3 comes at a time when CenturyLink and Savvis, its data center and cloud services subsidiary continue to expand their data center presence to serve its growing base of cloud and managed service customers. Earlier this week, the service provider announced it will build a second data center that will go live in Toronto next summer. For more:
- see the release Related articles:
CenturyLink legacy declines drag revenue down to $4.52B
Savvis to light new Toronto data center in 2014
Savvis supplies low-latency services to IEX Group
CenturyLink to expand Prism TV to Highlands Ranch
CenturyLink adds Denver suburb to its growing IPTV market roster Read more about: cloud services, PaaS
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Deutsche Telekom has begun offering its VDSL2 service to customers in the first 10 communities in its operating territory. Initially supporting up to 50 Mbps, the telco will implement vectoring on its copper lines to offer up to 100 Mbps in the second half of 2014. Last December, the telco announced that it would spend €6 billion ($7.9 billion) to build out a FTTC network to expand download speeds on its copper lines from 50 to 100 Mbps. During the first phase of the VDSL2 roll out, the telco will cover 77,000 households. It will then upgrade the next 45 local networks in phases by March to extend the higher speed services to 1 million homes. Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, technical director for Deutsche Telekom, said in a release that "by the end of next year, it will then be already three million households in 100 local networks." DT is one of a handful of European providers offering VDSL2 services. Belgacom, OTE, TDC Denmark and Telekom Austria A1 are all in one stage or another of deploying a mix of VDSL2 with vectoring in their serving areas. For more:
- see the release
Related articles:
Deutsche Telekom lays out $39B FTTC, wireless broadband plan
Deutsche Telekom mulls vectored DSL
Deutsche Telekom to bring FTTH to apartment complexes
Deutsche Telekom conducts 512G transmission experiment Read more about: Deutsche Telekom
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Huawei, Ciena (Nasdaq: CIEN) and Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) benefited from a 4 percent year-over-year rise in WDM equipment spending during the third quarter, reports Infonetics Research in its quarterly optical network hardware report. While Ciena won't release earnings until Dec. 12, Alcatel-Lucent reported in Q3 2013 that its WDM portfolio revenues grew 10 percent due to deployments by carriers in the Americas and Asia Pacific. However compelling the rise in WDM spending was during the quarter was, Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics said it came at a time when "overall optical spending is down on a quarter-over-quarter and year-over-over basis." Schmitt added that he expects "Tier 1 carriers to dial back spending." On a global perspective, the overall optical hardware market declined 7 percent sequentially and 1 percent year-over-year. In EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) WDM spending declined on a year-over-year and sequential basis, nearing the record low set in 1Q13. One shining star was North America, where optical spending rose 13.4 percent year-over-year, following an 11.1 percent year-over-year increase in Q2 due to aggressive 100G optical rollouts by Tier 1 service providers such as Sprint (NYSE: S) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ). For more:
- see the release
Related articles:
Optical growth in 2013 driven by 100G, says Infonetics
Alcatel-Lucent's Q3 IP revenues jump 7 percent to $789.2M Read more about: WDM
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Zayo has turned its attention to the Miami market as its latest expansion target as its subsidiary zColo builds out a new colocation facility in Digital Realty Trust's (DRT) data center, located at 36 NE 2 St. in downtown Miami, and a new metro fiber network that will connect the new location. As part of the investment in Miami, Zayo will build a high-count fiber ring to connect the DRT data center to the NAP of the Americas at 50 NE 9 St. zColo will occupy 24,000 square feet of colocation space on the 7th floor of the DRT building, supporting up to 4 megawatts of utility power with a fully redundant (N+1) power and cooling infrastructure. This new location in Miami builds on zColo's expansions in the Seattle, Austin, Phoenix and Chicago markets. At the DRT facility, zColo will be able to provide diverse in-building access to 15 major carriers and a virtual presence in the NAP of the Americas data center via Zayo's metro-interconnect dark fiber solution. Customers that are present at this location will be able to get access to Zayo's entire set of services, including dark fiber, wavelengths, Ethernet, SONET, IP, and professional services. Zayo's expansion in Miami caps off an ongoing effort to expand long haul connectivity in the southeast United States, which includes bringing Richmond, Raleigh, Tampa and Orlando onto the Zayo network and providing diverse connectivity into Miami. Being a major entry point into Latin America, the network investment in Miami will also support connectivity with major providers that are supporting the data demands of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 XXXI Olympic Summer Games, both of which will take place in Brazil. But Latin America connectivity is just one part of the broader set of connection capabilities Zayo will enable with this investment. Greg Friedman, vice president of zColo, said in a release that " this new investment allows regional customers to access our US and European fiber network." For more:
- see the release Special report: The Contenders: Dark fiber providers add a new layer of flavor on the network cake Related articles:
Zayo's fiscal Q1 shows 10 percent rise to $264.3M, boosted by acquisitions
The Contenders: Dark fiber providers add a new layer of flavor on the network cake
Zayo acquires FiberLink, expands dark fiber network to 26,000 miles
Zayo wraps up Access Communications acquisition, adds 1,200 metro fiber miles Read more about: Metro Ethernet, Zayo
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