Summary
For many commercial builds of a sizable nature, it appears that Time Warner Cable will take fiber to the premises. It could be anything from delivery of fiber to a library as part of a government contract or to the corporate headquarters of a fairly large retailer, which could get multiple fibers. The MSO will usually terminate fiber on its own hardware in the business’ equipment room, including going up to offices on higher floors.
Analysis
The price for one Gigabit Ethernet and up from Time Warner is quite a bit cheaper than from a telco. An obvious advantage is that any player that comes into a market late does not have to deal with the entire legacy from a carriage point of view. Even in cases in which fiber goes to a node and coax the rest of the way to a business, the prices of these services significantly undercut the normal-type provider. However, Time Warner cannot compete if it means one or two T1s. A DS-3 would have been about break-even. As a general rule, the cost advantage on the MSO’s services tends to favor the bigger bytes (the higher the data rate, the easier it is for Time Warner to compete), while the cost of delivering any service is all the same – it is all in the fiber construction. At Time Warner, a lot of the fiber transmission is done aerially because of the ownership of all the right of way with its poles. In a lot of cases, the customer can afford to get two diverse paths, or perhaps at least minimal exposure from, say, the building out to the street, and then get nearly true diversity from that point – while still cheaper than from the phone company. Obviously, the odds of losing two aerial spans at the same time are slimmer. For more information on this topic, please see the latest issue in our Fiber to the Premises Network Strategies Monthly, “ Fiber to the Business at Time Warner Cable Up Close ” The report can be purchased directly from GLG.
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
