Managing the Future

In many respects, Optimum Lightpath is an unusual CLEC. Its parent company is a cable operator (Cablevision); its service strategy is all-Ethernet-over-fiber; and it uses standard, flat-rate pricing as a competitive advantage. But Optimum Lightpath hasn't found that approach limiting in any way as it develops a managed services strategy as well, most recently adding Lightpath Managed Video service, which targets content developers, medical facilities and others in the New York City metro area, the company's footprint.

The new service is indicative of Optimum Lightpath's overall strategy, said David Strauss, vice president of marketing. “It's frankly a matter of ‘we built this intelligent enterprise network, and that has given us the ability to move more and more traffic over it and to offer more applications over it,’” Strauss said. “When you consider where we are based and geographically the amount of video being moved by the media and entertainment companies located in the metro New York City area — and add to that others that want video conferencing, surveillance, and more — we know we will have considerable growth in this product.”

Lightpath Managed Video includes connectivity as well as encoding and decoding of digital video. “We are saying, ‘Let us be the experts in video, and you take the service and move it forward and manage your content,’” said Glenn Calafati, director of product development. Optimum Lightpath is leveraging its all-Ethernet network and Ethernet-based encoding and decoding equipment to offer service in 1 Mb increments, which helps prove the economics of a managed video service, he said.

“We are able to say, ‘Here is a video interface; pick the speed of the service you want,’” Calafati said. “We manage that down to the electrical interface where video is terminating. In the process, we are going deeper into the customers' realm and solving the business problem for them. They don't have to have the in-house expertise for how to manage these devices.”

This latest service builds on the video transport service the company announced a year ago. “We have had video in our portfolio for many years, but it was based on legacy wave-based [Sonet] technologies that were static, rigid and cost-prohibitive,” Calafati said. “There were no economies of scale on the hardware side. Now we can use the underlying benefit of Ethernet across all services. We don't have fixed increments — T-1s, bonded T-1, DS-3s, OC-3s — that are controlled by the technology. That melts away, and we can do everything in the granularity of one-meg increments so we are not over-provisioning things. That lets us create services that make sense.”