Birch Communications is seeing the fruit of its aggressive fiber buildout take shape: the CLEC reported that preliminary metro fiber sales figures for the quarter that ended at the close of December 2015 show a 179 percent jump.
While the service provider did not reveal specific revenue numbers, it said that it expects fourth quarter 2015 organic sales to be about 118 percent higher than what it saw in the fourth quarter 2014 and around 80 percent higher than in the first quarter.
Expanding its metro fiber network has been a key priority for Birch. In November, Birch said it added 80,000 buildings across its 22-state footprint, deepening its on-net building fiber reach to over 400,000 fiber-fed buildings and making it a more competitive threat to the likes of AT&T (NYSE: T) and Verizon (NYSE: VZ) as well as cable operators like Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA).
Through its BirchLink Metro-Fiber service line, Birch can address customer needs with a larger portfolio of speeds from 1.5 Mbps up to 1 Gbps. Heavy data users can purchase up to 1 Gbps of symmetrical bandwidth. Besides offering higher speeds, the service provider can a address the growing trend of providing Ethernet access to VPN services.
Given the challenges of building a network, Birch is taking a hybrid approach to extending fiber to buildings in its footprint. It is complementing its own fiber build outs by purchasing long-term fiber indefeasible rights of use (IRUs) from other network partners. This approach will enable it to reach its ambitious goal of gaining a fiber presence in 1 million buildings.
Vincent Oddo, president and CEO of Birch, told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that this fiber build process will enable it to more rapidly scale to fulfill multi-site business customer contracts.
"When you're out there selling and you want the widest choice of broadband, you have to some ubiquity to have an efficient sale process so our goal is to leverage existing relationships," Oddo said.
Fiber sales were only one part of the company's growth cycle. Oddo said in a release that it saw "steadily rising demand for our Cloud services."
For more:
- see the release
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