Metropolitan area network provider OnFiber this week is expected to unveil a local access offering designed to provide customers with an alternative to incumbent carrier facilities.
Called AdaptiveLink, the service provides customized, fiber-based access bandwidth to companies looking to move transport beyond the copper loops and SONET speeds typically offered by RBOCs and interexchange carriers (IXC). AdaptiveLink also is targeted at those companies looking to employ multiple carriers for route diversity whose choices are becoming fewer now that RBOCs are buying up their IXC counterparts – SBC acquiring AT&T and Verizon purchasing MCI – and regulatory frameworks around unbundled network elements and broadband Internet access are being dismantled.
“The access market is becoming more proprietary,” says OnFiber CEO Danny Bottoms. “Ninety-five percent of access is still controlled by the Bells. People need choices.”
In addition to providing more choice, AdaptiveLink is intended to provide bandwidth options other than T-1 and DS-3 for companies looking to support critical applications such as disaster recovery, business continuity and data storage. It also is designed to address what OnFiber says are security shortcomings of the legacy copper infrastructure of the incumbents that encompass hundreds of central offices – each of which represents a point of failure in the network.
OnFiber augments its own T-1 and DS-3 TDM transport services with wavelengths and Ethernet. Bandwidth scales from 10M to 10G bit/sec.
OnFiber also says it can turn service up within weeks instead of months that it now takes.
“We’re the ultimate bypass [around] the RBOC,” Bottoms says.
Analysts say AdaptiveLink is an outgrowth of OnFiber’s AdaptiveBuild product, which is a customized WAN offering for inter-city connectivity.
“It is a segment of that process [in which they] take their knowledge of how to build big networks – finding fiber and where it’s supposed to go, avoiding certain geographic obstacles, and figuring out the best way of carrying data or traffic,” says Brian Van Steen, a senior analyst at Ovum-RHK.
Van Steen says OnFiber’s major challenge in selling AdaptiveLink will be to wean companies off of the incumbent facilities they’ve used for years. Customized services are generally priced at a premium, he says.
“How many companies can actually afford a customized solution?” Van Steen asks. “You’re definitely talking Fortune 500 company or equivalent. [The incumbents] are obviously all targeting the large companies with large revenue potential. It’s going to be competitive.”
The requirements of midsize to large companies are becoming more complex, Van Steen says, so the market for AdaptiveLink might expand beyond the Fortune 500 to the Fortune 1000.
OnFiber is initially rolling out AdaptiveLink in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., two metropolitan areas where it has 600 route miles in each city and where each has more than 10,000 businesses.
AdaptiveLink also is intended to increase OnFiber’s penetration into the access market. Twenty-three percent of the carrier’s revenue is from access, while 27% is from what OnFiber calls the Business Networks market – disaster recovery, business continuity and storage – and 50% comes from Metro Core carrier-to-carrier sales.
“We need to own the network and the customer in order to be successful in the long run,” Bottoms says.
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