WOW! Business is capitalizing on the growth of its business and wholesale markets in the 19 markets it serves by expanding and streamlining its service delivery process.
Over the past year, the service provider said it has doubled its 60-member service delivery team and has moved into a new national service delivery center in Huntsville, Ala.
Expanding the service delivery team comes at a time when WOW! Business is growing its presence in the Southeast and Midwest this year. The service provider has been rolling out its mix of data and voice services to a diverse set of businesses in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Evansville and Tampa metro areas.
Today, the service provider owns and operates more than 42,000 miles of local fiber-optic and coaxial networks in the Southeast and Midwest, along with data centers.
At the same time it has been seeing increasing demand for its wholesale services, particularly from wireless providers that require higher bandwidth Ethernet-based services and even dark fiber to keep up with demand for 3G and 4G services.
One of those markets was Chicago, where it was selected last month to provide fiber-based services to more than 500 towers for various wireless operators in metro area. These deployments include a mix of macrocells and microcells.
"We're helping them away from a combination of providing their own lit services so they would take dark fiber from us while others are continuing to buy Ethernet capacity from us, but it depends on the company's approach," said Brad Cheedle, senior vice president of business services at WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The amount of bandwidth that they are consuming, and continue to consume, is calling for them to put in technologies that allow them to scale significantly more than what they wanted to do in the past."
One wholesale product that WOW! is continuing to see interest from its wireless operator customers is dark fiber.
"It depends on the carrier, but I would say more of the bigger ones care about fiber, while the third and fourth tier wireless operators are still buying finished capacity," Cheedle said. "We are still selling Ethernet to solve wireless backhaul to major providers while they figure out their game plan."
For more:
- see the release
Related articles:
WOW! Business to extend fiber network to 500 wireless towers in Chicago
WOW gains 3,700 video and 14,600 broadband subs in fourth quarter
WOW halts Time Warner Cable overbuild in Ohio town after residents complain about damage