In the spotlight: Mike Rouleau, Time Warner Telecom

Telephony's Vince Vittore talks with Mike Rouleau, senior vice president of strategy and business development for Time Warner Telecom, about selling Ethernet, capturing the customer and customizing bandwidth.

On selling Ethernet: It's not just bandwidth capacity. What we are selling is an application. We're selling the customer the ability to do a lot of different things. Because it's plug and play--and because what we're trying to do is extend that local area network across town or across the country--we have to mirror within the public network what customers have built in their network. Our objective is to make the network almost transparent to the customer so the application rides on top. We're not just brute-forcing this with bandwidth.

On selling voice-over-IP on top of Ethernet: We work on the front side with some of the VoIP providers like Avaya and Cisco to make that work. There is an opportunity to go to a customer with a fully converged platform and say, 'Instead of delivering a PRI to your PBX, what we can deliver is a SIP trunk.' We use this as an attack strategy and help customers scale up. Some of the incumbents are going to have less desire to cannibalize that PRI revenue.

On capturing the customer: We introduced the capability to offer special access circuits as a service for our Ethernet. The majority of our business is on-net, and we'll pick up a couple of locations off-net with a special access circuit. It's a finished service, and then we put equipment on that to hand the customer an Ethernet interface.

On bandwidth: We took a slightly different approach. We offer service from 10 Mb/s to 10 Gb/s. Our job is to give customers the full line rate. We have a half Gig, full Gig and 10 Gig. We wanted to try to minimize the number of times you touch the customer's network for upgrades. It depends on the customer and their app--10 Gb/s is still a lot of bandwidth. Having that many buildings lit with fiber, though, we'll get a lot of customers that don't need more than 10 Mb/s. However, over half of the ports we've deployed are 100 Mb/s or higher. We've really gone to the higher end of the spectrum. The ones that take 10 Mb/s are the small and medium enterprises, and they're more focused on Internet access. Most of our customers are building a robust backbone.