Alpheus Communications, a regional Texas metro fiber provider, is moving forward with its plans to even make a bigger name for itself in the competitive yet lucrative services market.
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Image source: Alpheus |
Targeting medium-sized businesses, it plans to invest over $10 million in 2012 to simultaneously expand its workforce by 30 percent and its fiber network. Particularly, it has added 20 enterprise sales people as well as pricing, provisioning and account managers.
Expanding its presence in the business services segment isn't much of a stretch for the Houston-based provider. Already, it provides wholesale fiber-based wholesale services to a number of operators that deliver services to their respective customers.
One of Alpheus' key assets is an extensive on-net Ethernet footprint. To date, 88,000 buildings are qualified to get the service provider's Metro Ethernet services via fiber, Ethernet over Copper (EoC) or traditional TDM.
Complementing the on-net footprint are 2,800 miles of long-haul fiber and 3,200 miles of metro fiber.
"We are a primarily a carrier's carrier, and once you establish a good wholesale business, it's a logical extension of the business to then morph into enterprise," said Scott Widham, CEO of Alpheus, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We have productized a number of services, including a VoIP product, managed services, and an MPLS service that's interesting to the enterprise market."
Alpheus has also opened up a new office in Dallas and is expanding its fiber to new areas to capitalize on growth opportunities.
"Like Harris County in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth is growing like a weed, so it's a great climate to do business and we expect to expand into additional markets such as Austin and San Antonio as time goes on, but this is our first major step into a new market," Widham said.
As an ongoing element of its strategy, Alpheus is also expanding the reach of its fiber network to reach into new buildings in the Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and Houston (aka DASH) markets. In Houston alone, the emerging "Energy Corridor" is also presenting itself as a new wholesale and business service opportunity for the competitive provider.
"There's a new area of Houston called the Energy Corridor, and we're building to everything we can there, but we make a priority out of office buildings, data centers, wireless MTSOs and continue to build into a number of Bell COs," he said.
Widham added that Victoria, Waco and Bryan-College Station are possible new targets to extend its business and wholesale services.
While Alpheus is motivated to get a larger chunk of the business services market, their bread and butter wholesale service, particularly wireless backhaul, continues to see new opportunities. This trend will likely continue as wireless operators are looking for alternative sources for fiber-based Ethernet services to support their ongoing 4G LTE wireless rollouts.
Alpheus' ambitions aren't just relegated to Texas. Earlier this year, Widham said that he would like to expand the company via targeted acquisitions in other regions that could enhance its data center services and wireless backhaul capabilities.
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