Tower Cloud deepens presence in enterprise market with Ethernet Private Line services

DALLAS—Tower Cloud has enhanced its product portfolio outside of being just a wireless backhaul-centric provider by serving up a new line of Ethernet Private Line services for enterprise customers.

The service provider's Private Line offering includes Ethernet services, optical wave services, LAN connectivity, point‐to‐point connectivity and machine‐to machine (M2M) connectivity, all of which is run over a fully redundant core network.

While Tower Cloud is not turning away from wireless backhaul opportunities, the company is seeing a growing demand to extend its fiber networks into enterprises in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama and South Carolina markets it serves.

"As we have seen the land grab basically in the backhaul space being over, there's still a lot of densification, but not the large buildouts that there were there three, four or five years ago," said George Townsend, vice president of business development for Tower Cloud in an interview with FierceTelecom. "We're taking this to the next level and rolling out our private line Ethernet and wave products and we're bringing that to all the markets in the Southeast where we currently serve."  

Targeting a host of financial institutions, health care providers, government agencies and educational institutions, the new Ethernet service will be available in multiple point‐to-point or point-to-multipoint network configurations.

Townsend said that most customers today want a point-to-point connection.

"We have a lot of demand for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint circuits and we'll do multipoint-to-multipoint, but we have not seen a lot of demand for that yet, but primarily it has been point-to-point," he said.    

Customers can chose from a host of data speeds scaling from 50 Mbps to 100 Gbps that offer a dedicated service connection combining an IP/MPLS platform and high transmission rates.

Townsend said the service will target a host of enterprises and other wholesale carrier customers that need off-net connectivity options.

"It's primarily going to be for large enterprises and wholesale customers--the typical carrier set you see out there like Level 3, XO, EarthLink, and some of our partners in the rural markets that need connectivity back to the major markets, educational facilities, as well as health care," he said. "We see a big push in telemedicine and the need for satellite campuses to be connected, and hospitals wanting the clinics and doctor's offices connected."

Having already signed up a number of customers, this is not just another build-it-and-they-will-come type of service opportunity.  

"We've been dabbling in it for the past few months and have already signed 13 deals from 100 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, but we're coming out to market now," Townsend said. "I just hired a new VP of large enterprise and wholesale sales and he'll be working for me helping to develop our growing sales force to get out there and market and sell to this particular space."

For more:
- see the release

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