Monday, April 01, 2013

The Billion Dollar CLEC

Global Capacity was a reseller of circuits before bankruptcy. Now they are a re-branded reseller of circuits in its One Marketplace. Netwolves and EarthLink just joined the One Marketplace. For EarthLink, it can sell some network capacity and it can extend its Type II reach.

"EarthLink (NASDAQ:ELNK) shares declined 3.22% and closed at $5.41 in the last trading session." I didn't know that they were trading at less than $6. It puts their market cap at under $600M! But they have revenue of $1.35B and a portion of that is just cash from dial-up.

Historically Billion dollar CLECs don't perform well - Intermedia (ICI) was the first, collapsed under its own short-term debt and had to sell for a cash offer from MCI, who just wanted Digex and sold the rest to Focal.

PAETEC was Arunis' baby that was going to hit a billion dollars. It did with some crazy acquisitions like Energy Brokers, Quagga, XETA, MacLeod, CavTel and USLEC. But all that wasn't enough and it sold itself to Windstream.

XO is a mess and has been for a while. There is something about the billion dollar mark in telecom that changes everything. But not all companies realize that the guy that gets you from A to B may not be the guy to get you from B to C.

Look at Level3 and Sprint. They have been stalled for years. New C-Suite could have fixed this probably.

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