FiberLight promotes Paul Pierron to CEO

FiberLight has named Paul Pierron as its new CEO, taking over the role after company founder Michael P. Miller retired last February.

Pierron

Serving as COO since 2013, Pierron oversaw the day-to-day operations of FiberLight's sales, operations and finance departments and played a key role in securing a number of key contracts with wireless operators and data center providers.

He comes to the CEO position with plenty of operations and business development experience.

A 39-year telecom industry veteran, Pierron held sales, operations, business development and customer service department roles at a mix of incumbent telco and competitive service providers, including AT&T (NYSE: T), Southwestern Bell, Sprint (NYSE: S), Nuvox and LightCore. He also previously served as president and CEO of both PEG and Xspedius Communications.

Among some of the biggest initiatives Pierron drove as COO was the company's network builds into the mid-Atlantic region and the 8,000-mile expansion of its fiber network in Texas. In January, the service provider completed the construction of more than 4,500 miles of its planned 8,000 mile expansion across the central and western parts of the state, which was initially driven to fulfill the needs of a large wireless backhaul customer.  

Wireless backhaul continues to be a key revenue driver for FiberLight. While it has had good luck in pursuing Tier 1 market opportunities, Pierron said it is seeing new growth in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

"We're seeing growth for wireless backhaul in secondary and tertiary markets," Pierron said in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We're seeing demand for both dark fiber and lit services."

Another area of growth for FiberLight is the data center provider market. This segment is purchasing a mix of dark fiber and lit DWDM-based wavelength services that need to connect their facilities to Internet hubs.

Pierron said that the buildout of data centers in smaller markets like Amarillo, Texas is being driven by the energy industry.

For more:
- see the release

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Dark fiber reignites as wireless backhaul heats up – Year in Review 2013
FiberLight gets $97.2M cash infusion to fund network expansion