NEW YORK – Seeking to boost its market share of medium- and large-sized companies, Rogers Communications’ business unit is pressing other North American cable operators to interconnect their networks and coordinate their commercial products and services.
Speaking at a Light Reading conference on cable business services here last week, Terry Canning, senior vice-president of Rogers Business Solutions, argued that cable companies have a great opportunity to lure enterprises away from telcos because of cable’s unique hybrid fibre-coax (HFC) architecture, abundance of fibre lines and advanced DOCSIS 3.0 broadband technology. He also contended that cable has an advantage because its fibre networks are concentrated in suburban, residential areas where many small businesses are located, while the telcos have mainly installed fibre in large metro rings.
“Owning the plumbing isn’t sexy, but it is a competitive advantage,” Canning said. “Rogers’ regional fibre assets rival those of the telcos.”
But, Canning conceded, Rogers and other cable companies lack the multi–regional, national and international network reach of the big telcos. Although Rogers has no trouble finding enterprise customers for its Ethernet over fibre services, he noted, the challenge is getting the fibre to some larger companies. In particular, Rogers finds it tough to compete for the business of big companies with multiple locations scattered across the country or globe.
Hoping to resolve this problem, Rogers is developing network-to-network interfaces (NNIs) to interconnect its HFC network with those of other cable operators. But, Canning said, more work must be done to create a standard commercial product set across the cable industry. “MSOs must work together to align their product offerings, establish interconnects with each other and evolve from regional players to integrated national ones,” he said. “Where you can’t build, partner!”
Besides calling for network interconnects, Canning urged cable operators to overcome their reputations as "best effort" service providers by delivering higher-quality service to their most important commercial customers. He argued that cable operators should try to go one step beyond the telcos, which have built their customer service reputations by guaranteeing 99.999% or better network availability. "Telcos were built on the five-nines, but they stopped there," he said. "We have the opportunity to win huge shares of marketplace if we pursue 100 [percent availability]. But we're not there yet."
Canning said 100% availability is particularly important now as more enterprises move critical applications into the cloud and rely on network connections into the cloud for those applications. “We are at a crossroad to follow the telcos or pursue 100,” he said.
For its part, Rogers is building a mesh network to reduce the points of failure in case of fibre cuts, Canning said. In addition, the MSO is developing a business-class network operations centre (NOC) to manage commercial customer needs better and support service portals that let business customers see how their networks are operating. As well, and unlike most MSOs, Rogers is also using its vast wireless network to monitor its cable network and provide backup services when that network goes down. But Canning doesn't see wireless as a major backup option for cable.
What’s more, Canning said, Rogers is being more proactive about preventive maintenance to avoid further problems. Plus, he said, the MSO is trying to be systematic about learning from what goes wrong to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
In another conference keynote address, Kevin O'Toole, senior vice-president of product management and strategy for Comcast Business Services, said Comcast’s rollouts of DOCSIS 3.0 and Metro Ethernet service are already paying dividends with commercial customers. He said small businesses and mid-sized enterprises are both flocking to Comcast as cloud services drive bandwidth requirements in the last mile and firms seek alternatives to the telcos.
"I think cable, in general, and Comcast, in particular, can be an incredibly unique breed of cat,” O’Toole said. He argued that cable operators, unlike the incumbent telcos, don’t have any twisted pair to defend and, unlike the CLECs, don’t have to rely on someone else's last-mile network facilities. For instance, he noted, Comcast has facilities-based, last-mile access in 20 of the top 25 U.S. markets, stretching across 599,000 route miles.
O’Toole said Comcast’s business services unit is how generating revenue at a US$1.85 billion annual run-rate, up from nearly $1.3 billion in 2010. Thanks to such rapid growth, Heavy Reading projects that the MSO will easily blow past the US$2 billion revenue mark next year.
Cartt.ca contributor Alan Breznick is a Toronto-based senior analyst at Heavy Reading, part of the Light Reading Communications Network at UBM TechWeb.
