Fedor Smith, leading analyst at Atlantic-ACM monitored the kick-off panel at today's Metro Connect 2013. The topic was mapping the metro market; particularly the opportunities and threats for 2013 and beyond. Panelists include Kevin Coyne of Fiberlight, Kevin O'Hara of Integra Telecom, Clint Heiden of Sidera Networks and Dan Caruso, Zayo Group.
Kevin Coyne kicked off the talk discussing the focus on customer service-- unveiling that Fiberlight plans on owning the Texas market, with a focus on expanding its footprint and moving out to rural areas. Kevin states "own your own destiny with infrastructure."
No matter the consolidations, such as Lightower and Sidera, and AboveNet and Zayo, Fiberlight feels well positioned. "There are always opportunities to expand our revenue streams. We provide our core product, transport, to our clients."
Kevin O'Hara of Integra weighed in further. Historically Integra was a small business CLEC but acquired some great assets. Considering cable as a considerable threat, Integra over the past 18 months or so, moved upstream in its enterprise market. Integra is a western carrier, such as Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Montana and eastern Washington. Financial services don't make a cut in their markets, so they were interested in what was driving bandwidth in healthcare and other key verticals. Now offering up to 60Megs to businesses via its footprint, Integra also focuses on the wholesale market.
Clint Heiden weighs in on the Sidera and Lightower merger. He joked that there were only four metro providers left, eyeing Dan of Zayo sitting next to him on the panel. The main focus for Sidera during the merger is 1. to keep productivity going during the merger period 2. keeping key talent. They are continuing their efforts in the cloud space, which they feel is important, as fiber is critical to cloud offerings. Heiden states, "Sidera is looking at big pipes for wholesale. 100Gig is on us and ready to happen. We are talking Terabytes to customers."
Dan joked that Zayo is talking 2 Terabytes.
Clint continued that creating diversity in unique routes for cloud services is critical. Clint is discussing on getting away of products of the past. It's no longer about 10G from point A to point B, but if he can offer a Terabyte of traffic on his network with flexible bandwidth bursts. For the industry to play more together, part of it is the data center infrastructure.
Dan was then asked, "What's next? How can we keep pace with you?" Dan changed the question to be what can we do together to be a viable industry. The burden of proof is on us that we know how to create equity value, quarter over quarter, through financial performance. If we are, the industry will be recognized as what it is, a great segment of the broad telecom industry. This will dispel those lingering myths that we didn't learn from our previous bubble burst.
Fedor then asked what is being over-valued? Dan said he sees that buyers are differentiating between properties, showing a certain level of new sophistication. Buildings with fiber are seeing high-multiples and moving forward with continued value. So he believes the market is doing a great job in seeing the value.
Fedor then asked, how much bandwidth need are you seeing? Dan said this is real. Our customers-- particularly the big Internet companies- need tons of bandwidth spread across the nation.
Clint agreed, the Internet players are driving this. Cisco predicted 2014 traffic's incremental growth will be larger than the bandwidth of today. Clint reiterated, the bandwidth spike is here.
Stay tuned to TNN On the Road for your latest Metro Connect happenings.
