Looking forward to the next several years, what growth do you see in the sale of bandwidth to the enterprise market?  What are your thoughts on enterprise customers leasing dark fiber?

With new technologies such as teleradiology and distance learning programs as well as recent FCC regulations, limited network sharing and federal regulations such as HIPPA or SEC guidelines are driving companies to send and retrieve more amounts of data in between locations than ever before. High bandwidth availability has become as critical a resource to businesses as electricity. Over the next several years we expect this trend to continue up even more.

Certainly our experience is that leasing dark fiber is a major play for businesses with 2 or more high-bandwidth locations within a metro – and it’s trending down market. We have the expected customers – healthcare, education, finance, etc., as customers, and we are now seeing smaller customers looking to control their own bandwidth. For instance, we have a small printing company in Buffalo connecting two locations with dark fiber. We have a food service provider in Indiana connecting one location to a data center for disaster recovery. We also think this trend will continue over the next few years as more and more enterprise customers look for redundancy of their circuits from the LEC.

This entry is the second in a series with Mike Hurley, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Fibertech Networks.