Optimum Lightpath ignites 5,000 business buildings with fiber

Optimum Lightpath, a competitive service provider serving predominantly New York metro-based businesses, now has a fiber network that is connected to over 5,000 buildings.

On top of its fiber network, the service provider has continued to evolve its product set to develop industry vertical-specific applications including Interactive Patient Care for the healthcare sector, an Education Services Suite for schools, 40 Gigabit and Low Latency Optical Transport Service for the financial services sector, and Internet Voice Bundle and Next-Generation Hosted Voice for mid-market and large businesses.

Being in the New York City area, Optimum Lightpath can help financial firms, for example, overcome latency issues to stay competitive by being able to make stock trades in nanoseconds.

Brian Washburn, research director of network services for Current Analysis, said that while the announcement is not completely surprising, it gives Optimum Lightpath's existing and potentially new customers more network diversity.

"Optimum Lightpath is steadily investing in both additional routes and in extending reach directly into more buildings, and its footprint in the tri-state area around New York City is quite dense, which means the company can offer customers a lot of physical route options," he said in an interview with FierceTelecom. "This includes connectivity to dozens of major third-party data centers around its footprint; direct paths to shave microseconds off round-trip latency for its low-latency services; and route-around services such as its Manhattan bypass option for companies that have really specific redundancy requirements."

Washburn added that while "none of these services is exactly new to Optimum Lightpath, the more routes it builds and the more buildings it connects, the more customers it can reach, and the company can give those customers more routing options."

Having these options on hand will enable Optimum Lightpath to not only differentiate itself from a host of emerging competitive carriers like AboveNet (NYSE: ABVT), Sidera, Lightower and Zayo Networks, but also against powerful incumbents like Verizon (NYSE: VZ) that are often restricted by regulatory mandates.

"Optimum Lightpath is a strong competitor to Verizon (incumbent in NY, NJ) and AT&T (incumbent in CT), and it can cross state boundaries without going through the regulatory distinctions the incumbents have to mind (ie. intra-state vs. inter-state, in-footprint regulated vs. out-of-footprint largely unregulated," Washburn said. "Verizon makes up for some of this with 'Corridor Service,' which can combine NY/NJ services, and deregulation of most high-capacity services (including Ethernet services) has taken away a lot of incumbent restrictions, but OL as a competitor still has an advantage of being less regulated, and being able to focus in on just its tri-state metro footprint."

For more:
- see the release

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