|
Carrier Services
SureWest Touts Aggressive Last Mile Strategy
Carrier Eyes Glass, HD As New Year Arrives
by Jim Barthold
For SureWest Communications, fiber is the best way to cover the
distance between any two points. While the Northern California-based
competitive provider assembled its business with a jumble of
technologies including copper and coax, it has laser-focused its future
on glass.
“We’re moving away from what little hybrid fiber/coax (cable plant) we
have,” said Bill DeMuth, SureWest’s CTO noting that fiber is the only way
to meet the company’s goal of delivering 100 megabits of bandwidth to
each subscriber home. “It’s just a continual movement with increased
bandwidth. I don’t know why they’re buying it, but they do acquire it.”
SureWest can use the big pipe to skip over interim steps like VDSL and
MPEG-4 and go right to advanced IPTV offerings like multiple channels of
high definition (HD) programming.
“We rolled out our HD early (last) year and since then we’ve added
additional video channels and things like subscription-on-demand,” said
DeMuth. “We spent more time around the packages, the content. We’ve
increased data speeds.”
Twenty of the 100 megabits are dedicated to high-speed data (HSD),
leaving plenty for enhanced services that differentiate the carrier from
its cable, telco and satellite competitors.
“In the past we’ve spent a lot of time making sure we had content,
quality and reliability,” DeMuth said. “Now we really want to step up the
effort to differentiate the services. The IPTV industry as a whole has
been a little too much of a me-too type of service.”
So even as other carriers prepare to carry video over IPTV, SureWest
looks for ways to enhance it with digital video recorder (DVR) capabilities
and more synergies with its HSD and voice offerings.
“People come to us because of our high-speed data. Voice consumers
are usually looking for price and reliability,” he said. “IPTV, we’ve lagged
with DVR products so we need to get into that space. The localized
content issues add a really strong line-up of video channels.”
It helps, he said, that fiber is getting cheaper – both for the glass and
the equipment to drive signals over it.
“The other thing with fiber is that you cut down on the operational costs
because you’re not maintaining copper,” he said. “Cable companies have
to deal with coaxial linkage and stuff like that on their plant. Those kinds
of things are eliminated with fiber.”
The biggest stumbling block SureWest faces is the same one that’s
confronting everyone in the industry: the IPTV equipment is not quite
there yet.
“Service providers need to be aware that while IPTV gives you a lot of
flexibility, that flexibility comes with an additional challenge of
integration,” DeMuth said. “The integration of the various vendor
solutions … you don’t want to underestimate that.”
|
