DALLAS—Global Capacity is enhancing its effort to extend services into harder to reach rural areas by establishing a new arrangement with INDATEL, a middle mile network consortium that provides fiber-based Ethernet services in Tier 2 and 3 markets.
By establishing this agreement, INDATEL will provide Global Capacity's One Marketplace members with access to its over 500 rural LEC members and 80,000 fiber route miles of middle-mile network serving over 5,000 communities nationally.
For its part, INDATEL will gain four key benefits for its member companies: access to more network connectivity, the ability to promote network locations and capability to a larger market, market intelligence and the chance to participate in larger off-net and outsourced opportunities as part of a larger solution that One Marketplace brings.
Ben Edmond, chief revenue officer for Global Capacity, told FierceTelecom that it is a symbiotic relationship.
"It's a complementary relationship for Global Capacity on two fronts," Edmond said. "It really helps those providers extend outside of their footprint and reach to reach the rest of the world through Global Capacity's One Marketplace platform and then vice versa, take our customers interconnected into One Marketplace today and help us reach more effectively into that portion of rural America buying services through INDATEL."
Edmond added that the relationship goes beyond just another simple interconnection agreement.
"We have taken a granular level of detail to understand their network for these rural properties, mapping it into our databases of commercial addresses, validating what's multi-location and try to create thought processes around what the opportunity for both sides really is," Edmond said. "There's a lot of business out there and we think this is a unique asset that helps us both on the buy and the sell side."
While Global Capacity has continued to expand its U.S. reach into large markets such as Denver and Ashburn, Va., being able to reach into more rural markets will make the company more valuable to enterprises and service providers that have network connection needs outside of the traditional NFL cities.
"From a wholesale provider perspective, our customers are increasingly looking at us to reach these deeper parts of the country where they invest their capital in their network in the Tier 1 cities," Edmond said. "That takes a lot of capital and we have helped solve a problem by reaching more effectively into these other parts of the country for them."
In tandem with expanding INDATEL's network reach, Global Capacity's One Marketplace will offer an opportunity to sell on-net services for INDATEL and leverage their Ethernet network assets and capacity.
The service provider will also be able to give INDATEL's rural members an even broader set of capabilities when it completes its pending acquisition of MegaPath's wholesale assets.
Bringing its services into secondary and tertiary markets has become another leg Global Capacity's overall network expansion effort.
In addition to INDATEL, the service provider has established similar relationships with the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), PEG Bandwidth and ANPI.
With NCTC, the service provider is helping independent cable operators to expand their reach, for example. Such a pact will become more relevant for smaller cable operators, particularly as they try to serve multi-site larger business customers and expand their over-the-top video offerings by establishing cost-effective interconnection agreements to get access to the major Internet hubs.
For more:
- see the release
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