Bernard, and All, Do you recall Ray Jensen's tales of the Colo-Zoos in PacTel land? I found that Data Communications article you posted highly reinforcing, since it highlights quite accurately some of the conditions some clients (on the carrier side) have encountered and related to me, recently.
Maybe I can return the favor with the following, if you've not read it already. It's an interesting carriers' carrier article in this week's Telephony mag at
internettelephony.com
The article is titled:
"The Rise of the arrier's Carrier"
Investors love the new fiber networks
by JOAN ENGEBRETSON
Here's a sidebar from the piece, below, regarding MFNX. Go to "In Focus" section at the above URL for the remainder of the article, which is a worth while read, IMO.
Enjoy, Frank Coluccio
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Local carrier's carriers
Like Qwest, Metromedia Fiber Network has few qualms about selling dark fiber to
other carriers. Also like Qwest, Metromedia's strength is in telecom outside plant.
But while Qwest's network will go coast-to-coast, handling the most popular
long-distance routes, Metromedia's network connects local exchange carrier central
offices and high-rise buildings, providing key routes within and between cities.
Metromedia is using a carrier's carrier strategy in the local market. Although it is not a
competitive LEC, it supplies fiber to new local market entrants. It also serves wireless
carriers, Internet service providers and large corporations. Companies typically sign
leases for a minimum of 10 years.
Customers like being able to increase their bandwidth as needed by upgrading their
own transmission equipment without paying any extra recurring charges, says
Metromedia Fiber Network Chairman and CEO Stephen Garofolo. "It's as if you're
leasing one floor of a 50-story office building and can move into the other 49
whenever you need to."
Garofolo founded the company, originally dubbed National Fiber Network, by
investing his own money in 1993. A few years later, the company attracted the
attention of investor John Kluge, who previously made a fortune in the television and
radio broadcasting business. Kluge's holding company, Metromedia, is still the
principal shareholder of the company now called Metromedia Fiber Network.
Metromedia has completed a local fiber network in New York and started
construction in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington. It also plans to build
in San Francisco. Revenues for the first six months of 1998 were $9 million--a
significant increase from 1997, when revenues were $2.5 million for the whole year.
When Garofolo first started planning his New York network, he learned that the
largest fiber bundle available was a 432-fiber offering from Lucent Technologies.
Since then, the company has used that product throughout its network.
Dense wavelength division multiplexing may be a viable alternative on long-distance
runs, but a high fiber count is critical in the local market, says Garofolo. In many
cases, he says, Metromedia's task is to bring fiber all the way to customer locations
where fiber never reached before.
Metromedia's strategy leaves the task of negotiating interconnection agreements with
the incumbent local carrier to its carrier customers. Because of the nature of its
offering, all of Metromedia's CLEC customers are facilities-based. In essence,
Metromedia is an alternative supplier of unbundled network elements.
WorldCom, another carrier's carrier in the local market, has adopted a very different
strategy--more like the strategy Frontier has chosen in the wholesale long-distance
market. WorldCom is both a retailer and a wholesaler in the local market. Its local
wholesale strategy, essentially, is to resell switched services to local carriers that are
not building their own local networks.
In some cases, WorldCom will handle the process of obtaining an unbundled loop
from the incumbent carrier to serve its wholesale customers, says Dale Thompson,
WorldCom's director of wholesale marketing. That would happen in cases in which
WorldCom's own facilities do not reach all the way to the end user, but WorldCom is
collocated in the incumbent carrier's CO serving that end user.
WorldCom is developing electronic interfaces to both the incumbent carrier and to its
own carrier customers.
"The customers we're talking with are looking for assurances that service will be up
and ready to go and will function properly so they can make commitments to their
customers," says Thompson.
Cutovers are especially complicated in the local market because the incumbent
carrier's dial tone must be removed.
"If we can't, with confidence, put up our dial tone at the appointed time, that impacts
the end user, our customer and us," says Thompson.
The difficulty of that task is what may have kept other carriers out of the local
wholesale market.
At least one more player will be joining in, however. Frontier is developing an
electronic interface to support its own local wholesale plans, says Tony Cassara,
president of carrier services for Frontier.
Frontier already offers local service on a retail basis in numerous networks
nationwide. It prefers to resell the incumbent carrier's service, rather than build its
own facilities--a strategy Cassara does not expect to change even when Frontier
becomes a wholesaler. However, the carrier may broaden its network suppliers to
include facilities-based CLECs, Cassara says.
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