Backbone-News

Global Crossing (NASDAQ: GLBC) reported today its consolidated financial and operational results for the fourth quarter and full year 2007.

• Consolidated revenue grew 4 percent sequentially to $616 million in the fourth quarter.
• Company generated $323 million or 52 percent adjusted gross margin in the fourth quarter.
• Consolidated revenue grew to $2.26 billion in 2007.
• Company generated $174 million in adjusted cash EBITDA for 2007.

Read the press release for further details.

Level 3 Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:LVLT) announced that Kevin O’Hara, one of the founders, is stepping down as the company’s president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
Neil Hobbs, currently executive vice president, sales and network services, has been appointed to the newly created position of executive vice president, operations. Neil Hobbs and Jim Crowe (CEO) will be assuming Kevin O’Hara’s responsibilities going forward. Jim Crowe will assume the additional title of president.

Sunit Patel will continue in the role of chief financial officer. This comes partly as a suprise, as Level3 announced in October last year that they were beginning the search of a new CFO.

As part of the internal finance organization changes, the company appointed Neel Dev to the new position of senior vice president, finance with responsibility for financial planning, budgeting and analysis for operations and the company’s customer facing market groups.

Cogent Communications reported on their blog that they are continuing to grow their network coverage in Europe. New countries added to their network footprint include:

Ireland: Dublin

Italy: Arezzo, Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Venice/Padua

Finland: Helsinki
Norway: Oslo
Sweden: Malmo

Czech Republic: Prague
Hungary: Budapest
Romania: Bucharest
Slovakia: Bratislava

Especially the cities in Eastern Europe show the recent trend of most of the major international Service Providers moving further into the eastern European countries, which have become a popular outsourcing region for many multinational corporations and which see a massive growth over the last years.

Click here to see their updated network map.

Shortly after having announced that nLayer chose the MX960 platform to extend/upgrade their network, Juniper adds another high profile Service Provider which has chosen the MX960 router. Carphone Warehouse (CPW) is providing connectivity to more then 1.5 million households in the UK, the largest part through AOL UK which CPW acquired last year.

CPW is using the MX960 as part of their NGN (Next Generation Network) in the UK which extends to 70% of UK households already.

Read more in the press-release.

Verisign has just released the March 2008 edition of the Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF). As Always it is a very interesting read, and gives a good impression of the continuing growth in our industry.

Just to give an example, I picked one interesting fact: The growth per ccTLD. While the German ccTLD (.de) is still the leader (12% growth year to year), the UK ccTLD ( 17% growth) has been pushed back to the third place by the chinese ccTLD with a massive 399% growth year to year!

1. .de (Germany)
2. .cn (China)
3. .uk (United Kingdom)
4. .eu (European Union)
5. .nl (Netherlands)
6. .ar (Argentina)
7. .it (Italy)
8. .us (United States)
9. .br (Brazil)
10. .ch (Switzerland)

Have a look at the complete report for details about the other TLD and also an update on the use of IPv6 in in relation to DNS.

The recent outage affecting YouTube caused a lot of discussions in the technical community. But there were also a lot of reports published which didn’t cover the real details about what happened and why it could have been prevented.

The RIPE NCC has recently published a case study of the events which gives a detailed inside view of the event using existing tools provided by RIPE.

Among other information, like a detailed time line of the events, the guys at RIPE also provide the following video which illustrates different stages of the outages using BGPlay:

You can read the case study here.

1&1 Internet announced on Tuesday the 10 Millionth domain registration. 1&1 offers domain registrations at low prices, including normally at least some basic hosting service. They confirm that they have seen “pleasing” growth of the domain name business over the past years. In fact they have double the number of domain names over the past 3 years.

The press-release also indicates that they have a 7 million strong customer base today, which consist of a 50/50 split between business users and consumers.

The date and location of NANOG43 have been announced. It will be held in Brooklyn,NY on June 1-4. This is the first time since a very long time that NANOG is organised at the East Coast.
The meeting will be hosted by . The Call for Presentations will be available shortly at the NANOG website, and meeting registration and venue information will be announced in early March.

Cisco launched their new Edge Router platform today at Cebit in Hannover. The ASR 1000 series of routers are targeted for the Enterprise and Service provider markets, and are placed in between the 7200 and 7600 series of routers.

The heart of the ASR 1000 is the QuantumFlow Processor. A highly dense custom ASIC providing up to 100Gpbs (up to 20Gbps in the ASR series routers) of packet processing bandwidth. This allows the entire payload and headers of frames to be processed by the chip, accelerating Deep Packet Inspection and application-specific processing.

The Cisco ASR 1000 series is available in different packaging options, differentiated by the number of I/O slots, capacity, redundancy, and power:

• Cisco ASR 1002 (2-rack-unit [2RU] chassis with the modular Cisco ASR 1000 Series Embedded Services Processor [ESP] and fixed Cisco ASR 1000 Series RP1 and Cisco ASR 1000 Series SPA Interface Processor [SIP] with 4 built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports)

• Cisco ASR 1004 (4RU chassis with modular ESP, route processor, and SIPs)

• Cisco ASR 1006 (6RU chassis with modular and redundant ESPs, route processor, and SIPs for SPA connectivity)

As the above list shows, only the ASR 1006 allows the use of redundant forwarding planes (ESPs) and route processors.

Two different ESPs will be available: ESP-5G and ESP-10G. The performance of the ESP is the core factor for all high-touch services provided on the ASR platform, including:

• IPsec
• QoS
• NBAR (Network Based Application Recognition)
• GRE
• Firewall
• Full and Sampled NetFlow

QoS is supported at multigigabit rates without any significant degradation to other data plane-bounded functions, and no degradation to control plane-related features.

The linecards used in the ASR 1000 are the already familiar SPAs. Following is the complete list of SPAs that are supported at platform first customer shipment (FCS):

• 8-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 1-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet
• 2-, 5-, and 10-port Gigabit Ethernet
• 8-port Fast Ethernet
• 8-port T1/E1
• 2- and 4-port T3/E3
• 2- and 4-port OC-3/STM-1 Packet over SONET/SDH (PoS)
• 1-port OC-12/STM-4 PoS
• 2- and 4 -port Channelized T3
• 4-port serial (12-in-1)

Customers include BT, who is going to use it as part of their 21st Century network and also NTT who use it as part of their IPTV network roll-out.