It's a coincidence

Adelphia Business Solutions follows cable sibling's path

It's coincidental that Adelphia Corp.'s Adelphia Business Solutions is sowing seeds in markets in which sister cable business unit Adelphia Communications already has broken ground.

But it's a happy coincidence.

"It looks that way because we bought a very nice cable property out on the West Coast in Los Angeles and, about the same time, announced that we were opening up that market for Adelphia Business Solutions," said John Rogers, vice president of marketing and product development for ABS. Even if ABS had not bought that cable market, it would still be opening up the Los Angeles market for the business unit, he added.

But Rogers won't disassociate himself from the cable end of the business.

"It's working out very nicely from a branding standpoint, wherever we have a cable presence and we introduce Adelphia Business Solutions," he said. "The Adelphia name is pretty well-respected from the cable side of our business, so the branding is very positive for the telephone side of the business."

It's nice, but it's not make-or-break for the unit that was established in 1991 as a wholly owned Adelphia subsidiary and took off as a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) in 1997 with 13 Northeast-based markets.

"The business plan - and we haven't wavered from this at all - called for us to build a facilities-based network and to provide bandwidth to a majority of our customers in a Type I and Type II environment," Rogers said. Type I runs fiber to the customer and Type II sources portions of the network from local providers.

ABS has been steadily expanding its nationwide reach, moving "from facilities-based networks in the Northeast, through the Mid-Atlantic states, down through the South, into the Midwest. We have staffed our project management people and our build has started out on the West Coast," Rogers said.

This kind of expansion means good times for firms such as Tekelec, which has been contracted to deliver turnkey signaling, services and diagnostic systems equipment for ABS' national fiber optic network.

"We've sold them a bunch of services, and the idea is we'll turn up and configure the Tekelec network for Adelphia," said Dick Hayter, vice president of Tekelec's Eagle business unit.

ABS represents a foot in the door in an expanding and changing marketplace. "It's a significant opportunity for us," Hayter said. "It's interesting that Adelphia is a cable-based operator. They're one of the better-known, larger CLECs and they represent a significant chunk of business for us both in our existing order flow and going forward."

Tekelec's local number portability technology was an important ingredient. "We're currently doing a lot of local number portability," Rogers said. "When we go in and sell to a 10- or 20-line business, they typically want to keep their phone numbers. One of the things that local number portability allows us to do is provide this service on Adelphia's switches, get them on our infrastructure and facility, but keep their current phone numbers."

Tekelec also provides a service-creation environment and a database that supports telephony applications such as 800-number calling names and travel card services, Hayter added.

That got Rogers excited. "That's going to allow us to go out and create services that could be unique for [ABS] and allow us to differentiate ourselves in the market," he said. "Of course, those services would reside on [the Tekelec signal transfer points] and allow us to create the services and market them to our customers."

Among the additional services ABS anticipates is the ability to have call center routing that "follows the sun," said Tom Ferry, senior director of product development for ABS. "If we have a big customer nationally who has call centers starting up early on the East Coast and turning down late on the West Coast, using this service creation environment, we can create solutions that will allow them to have those calls routed based on the time of day."

The relationship with the cable branch of the family is always close to the surface of this business and will probably come into play with broadband voice over IP - and as Adelphia as a whole attacks the small office/home office and small business customer markets.

"That's a hot button of ours," Rogers said.

That market can be served by several transport mechanisms. "The business solutions can ride over either the twisted pair to the home, DSL to the home or, for that matter, cable," Rogers said. For today, ABS is content to move around the country - with or without Adelphia Communications.