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Dont call Time Warner Telecom a competitive local exchange carrier.
That terms too narrow for a company whose business encompasses voice, data and Internet services for wholesale and retail business customers in 39 U.S. markets.
“Were an emerging carrier,” says Mike Rouleau, vice president of marketing at Time Warner Telecom.
Under the leadership of CEO Larissa Herda, Time Warner Telecom rose from near-bankruptcy to become one of the industrys most stable players. In 2000, as other CLECs imploded, Time Warner Telecom upgraded big chunks of its networks to packet telephony, introducing dedicated Web hosting and Gigabit Ethernet.
The company operates broadband fiber networks in 39 markets and expects to complete five more in 2001. Those networks are hefty, averaging 400 route miles of fiber per metro service area and connecting 2,600 end-user buildings. “We think that you have to have a big footprint — not just downtown, but the suburbs as well,” Rouleau says.
On the agenda this year are incremental improvements and new services, including virtual private networks, unified messaging, business dial tone over Internet Protocol and Fibre Channel service offerings for storage.
Inter-Local Access and Transport Area networks also enable Time Warner Telecom to outmaneuver both long-distance providers and regional Bells. Recognizing that 60 percent of traffic originates and terminates within 600 miles, Time Warner Telecom built networks connecting key cities in Texas, the Southeast and the West Coast from San Diego to Seattle.
By moving away from selling unbundled services, the company minimizes its reliance on incumbents — relationships that crippled some data CLECs last year. Reciprocal compensation accounts for just 6 percent of Time Warner Telecoms revenue. Eighty percent of the companys $487 million revenue last year came from traffic that stayed on Time Warner Telecoms network.