In the spotlight: Covad's Lisa Graham

Covad Communications made a major addition to its wholesale service footprint last week, adding T-1 service to 285 additional cities through its relationship with New Edge Networks, a division of EarthLink. Lisa Graham, vice president of marketing for Covad, spoke with Telephony Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson about the development.

On the expansion: We are adding about 400 COs that are incremental to our footprint with the New Edge platform. We sell quite a bit to our wholesale partners, who sell into distributed enterprises, and footprint is their No. 1 need. The New Edge footprint is mostly in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, so this extends our reach there.

On targeted customers: This particular opportunity for wholesale we see focused on distributed enterprises — chains that look like small businesses. Examples of the kinds of verticals we see are gas stations, restaurant chains, retail stories, insurance offices.

On selling T-1s in a highly competitive market: T-1s are becoming more commoditized and moving up the bandwidth curve. What people like about Covad is our back-end systems, tools and automation. While many of our partners use multiple providers for T-1 service, we are most often the preferred provider because of our pricing and back-office capabilities.

On the imminent Ethernet threat: We are not losing a lot of sales to Ethernet today, but we see the trend coming; we are seeing people moving up the bandwidth curve. I don't think Ethernet has gained a lot of traction in our markets yet. We are looking for Ethernet; we don't have Ethernet offered to our wholesale partners. Covad is assessing developing those products on our network and launching Ethernet. We could do that through a partnership, [but] when you are wholesaling and doing it through a partnership, it eats into your margins, so we are looking at doing this on our own.