Summary
1.The data people at Embarq have grandiose plans for the carrier. 2.However, there is a bunch of long-timer folks in other parts of the company who are retiring or are talking about doing so because they cannot cope with the amount of change. 3.There also tends to be a false assumption that Embarq has adequate transport to deliver the planned bandwidths.
Analysis
CEO, Dan Hesse, has put Embarq’s second level management’s feet to the fire. Hesse, who was brought in from the outside to make the company competitive, has made it clear recently that the service provider is at a crossroads – either it maintains the status quo and lives with the consequences or it truly looks to grow and move ahead. While the delivered message seems a little bit extreme, and perhaps even childish, it needed to be said in order to open the eyes of a good number of the staff.
Hesse also expects every employee to be an Embarq sales representative. The only problem is one of practicality – the corporate headquarters is not in the telco’s territory.
The data folks at Embarq who have never been exposed to a regulated telephony environment, believe they can run all over the place and make major alterations right away despite the fact that the ILEC was on hold so long as part of Sprint. The transport capacity is usually not in place to meet their expectations.
A large current focus of Embarq’s planning and investment is on evolving its network to the IP core in order to deliver the services that will make it more competitive – while still cutting and scrimping to keep the bottom line as clean as possible. Yet, upper management tends to be very conservative, especially with any potentially big projects, in making sure there are guaranteed revenue streams, such as in moving to Ethernet, so that the dream of paying for it in the first year or so is real.
Concerning the discussion in the original article, the plan is to provide FTTH for greenfield applications. Interestingly, Embarq is talking about hybrid fiber/copper in the trench kind of a thing, which Sprint Local had back in 10 years ago in the HFC days. A bunch of the combined media buried in Florida right now – with the fiber currently wasted because the copper is just being used. Every single fiber drop there will now have to be tested to make sure it is satisfactory.
