Comptel: Verizon wholesale seeks national service

LAS VEGAS--Verizon Partner Solutions, the company’s wholesale arm, is responding to customer demand by creating a national wholesale service with uniform pricing.

The effort is part of Verizon’s determination to differentiate its wholesale services and cater to its wholesale customers, said Quintin Lew, vice president of marketing and sales for Verizon Partner Solutions.

“Our customers have been calling for a single national service,” he said. “Right now, we have different cost structures in different regions of the country, based on the legacy regulatory world. By April, we will have a national plan so that customers who use our services nationwide can have a single plan that covers our entire footprint.”

Verizon can then offer them volume discounts on that plan, based on their volume commitments, Lew said. “We are still working on the mechanics – it has taken one-and-a-half years to work these things out, and we will still have to honor the old tariffs. But we can look at our margins and how things have shifted since the old tariffs were filed.”

The company also is working on the ordering and billing support for a national service. This is the latest effort by Verizon to differentiate its long-distance services. Others include national Service Level Agreements, a bandwidth-on-demand service that is currently being trailed but is expected to be deployed in New York in the second half of this year.

Lew said Verizon is also prepared to be very aggressive on pricing, taking advantage of its regulatory forbearance to “very aggressively increase market share.”