For what it's worth

Maybe there are ways to adapt certain technology approaches to the requirements of the times, or to work harder to bypass regulatory obstructions or seemingly impenetrable incumbent facilities.

The cost of sales is one of the biggest expenses a service provider has.
Brian Andrew, co-founder and CEO, e-xpedient

The industry's current economic situation has generated lots of talk about dwindling capital expenditures by service providers but little accompanying analysis of how cash constraints shape carriers' customer acquisition efforts. After all, if you can no longer afford to fork out the dough necessary to build, expand and improve your network, how can you possibly afford to attract, add and provision customers?

The answer, I suppose, is that you can't at least not if you happen to be a competitive entity trying to infiltrate incumbent-controlled markets. At least not under current technology and, perhaps, regulatory models.

If incumbent carrier tactics make it exorbitantly expensive to garner copper loops that can be fitted for DSL, for example, the cost of connecting customers at the end of those loops probably outweighs the benefits. Same deal for paying for co-location space in central office cages. Same deal for laying new fiber, or even for renting and lighting existing optics. In many of those cases, it may no longer make economic sense.

So the vicious cycle continues. If you can't build or expand or enhance, you can't get more customers. If you can't get more customers, you can't generate additional revenue that would bring in more capital that could be invested back into the network. You're left waiting, presumably, for some source of capital to re-open and replenish your coffers.

But maybe there are some alternatives maybe there are ways to adapt certain technology approaches to the requirements of the times or to work harder to bypass regulatory obstructions or seemingly impenetrable incumbent facilities.

A small Florida-based ISP called e-xpedient believes it has found an answer, at least for its own purpose of selling packet data services to businesses. Brian Andrew, e-xpedient's co-founder and CEO, believes strongly that if a company can't radically diminish its own cost of acquiring customers while also radically improving customers' access speeds and experiences, the competitive service provider model will never work. Customer self-provisioning, Andrew says, is an absolute truth and critical to realizing all of those goals.

Also critical, according to Andrew, is reliance on what he calls commodity LAN technologies in e-xpedient's case, Ethernet. The company's strategy is to use a network of wireless links as a trunk to get bandwidth to a router in each building, then connect customers in the buildings to the routers via the Cat 5 cabling already there.

The upshot is that businesses in the building can buy into the bandwidth at the level they require by plugging into the e-xpedient port and paying for it with a credit card. It's simple and cost-effective, Andrew asserts, and a lot of paying customers in several cities have good things to say about the result.

There are, of course, many things a network like e-xpedient's can't support. It's not a full-service network that can provide all of the needs of a business customer such as voice, for one. It also doesn't claim to be or try to be, which might just be one of the most critical elements of all.

This is a company whose networks are up and running and expanding at a healthy clip a company that's generating revenue and that insists its methods for getting customers on-net and generating revenue remain economical, even in tight times. Smells like a strong competitive argument to me.

Contact Jason Meyers at jmeyers@intertec.com