Abstract

The concept of “build a network and customers will come” is now an old adage within the telecom industry that died when the Telecom bubble burst in 2000. Service Providers can no longer afford to provide fiber access to just any or every building that itstheir network backbone passes. The existence of revenue for bandwidth and/or higher order services from businesses located within the building—enough revenue to capture the Carriers’ interest and meet an aggressive payback window—is now a requirement.. Service Providers that have survived employ a multi-faceted sales strategy with several services: TDM bandwidth, Dark Fiber, Collocation facilities, Storage Area Networks, wavelengths and Ethernet-based TLS, VLANs or VPNs. However, multi-service offerings alone do not ensure survival in the Carrier space. A number of other factors, including building access and owning/controlling fiber backbone, contribute to service provider success. Delineation of costs, assets and customer service is also essential to comprehending the complete success picture. These factors have proven to be even more important than the multi-service offering. Infrastructure issues were the undoing of a number of companies.

© 2004 Optical Society of America