In the Spotlight: Bill DeMuth, SureWest Communications

Last week SureWest Communications announced the acquisition of Everest Broadband, a move to double its triple-play subscriber base by adding to its existing fiber-to-the-home network in Sacramento, Calif., a hybrid fiber/coax network in Kansas City, Mo. SureWest’s Chief Technology Officer, Bill DeMuth, spoke with Telephony’s Ed Gubbins last week about strategies to integrate the two businesses and what lies ahead.

On synergies: The opportunity we see is really to grow the revenues of both companies. The synergies weren’t based around cutting a lot of cost out of either one of them. There are a lot of common things. They’ve got fiber very deep in their residential network, especially for a traditional RF plant. Back in the central office and headend, we have a lot in common. They use the same switching technologies we do, both traditional switching and some of the unified messaging. We have a lot of common vendors, both from a technology and service standpoint—say for instance like content providers. While we see opportunities there, I don’t think they were the initial focus [of the deal]. SureWest gets a significant amount of our revenue from business customers. We see great opportunities there. They have fiber that extends around the greater Kansas City area. We can see a lot of synergies on that business side, leveraging SureWest’s experience as well as their own experience.

On building out FTTN or FTTH in Kansas City: Until we close the deal, we probably wouldn’t say one way or the other. But we’d seriously look at, if we were to build that, to probably go with some fiber-to-the-home technology. It may not be the same as what we’re doing here, but there are opportunities. We want to continue to provide high bandwidth, very high reliability and good customer care. [Everest is] more of a cable overbuilder like RCN, with fiber deep in the network and a good-quality 870 MHz video system. They’ve pushed the fiber down to the nodes. Each node is covering about 160 homes, so there’s a lot of bandwidth for those homes. They also have spare fiber at those nodes. We have the capability to split them or, if we wanted to deploy some different technology up there, we could do that, with fiber that deep in the network.

On how SureWest’s services will differ in the two markets: It’s still to be seen. For instance, the number of [high-definition] channels. For a lot of those things, you have to do network calculations of how much bandwidth you can provide. There may be varying degrees. Even at SureWest, what we’re doing over copper is different from what we’re doing over fiber. We’re able to manage those differences.

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