A conversation with Boyd Chastant, Director of Business Development, OnFiber

The Yankee Group credits OnFiber as one of the leaders of the metro retail wavelength services market in the United States, alongside industry giants Qwest Communications and AT&T. Though OnFiber doesn’t have as much network as its bigger rivals, it aims to be quicker and more resourceful, a strategy that’s paying off so far. OnFiber’s director of business development Boyd Chastant gave Telephony’s Ed Gubbins a clearer view into the company’s fast-growing glass enterprise.

On competing with incumbents: We were dealing with a customer, a large manufacturer of…different things, looking for disaster recovery applications. We came in a little late in the game. They were being pitched Sonet services by the incumbent, who said, “We can get you an OC-12 from one data center to the next, and you can do disaster recovery.” We said, “Why are you even using an OC-12 if you’re trying to link different server environments? Wouldn’t an Ethernet extension--or in this case, a 1.25-Gb/s wavelength connection--fit your bill?” “Oh, that would be perfect,” they said, “but no one ever proposed they could actually do that for us.” Boom. We walk in, we give them that alternative, give them a solution that’s completely diverse from existing networks. We can do it from custom builds we do as well as acquiring assets from other providers, knit that all together and create an end-to-end managed solution for them and deliver it quickly.

On the wavelength services market: You are starting to see people sell waves a little bit more. The challenge is, do they have that equipment and technology in-house? Have they gotten used to deploying it? Certain carriers have started to deploy it in the backbone but haven’t made the jump toward using it to enable services to customers. Some of them are getting over that hump.

On AdaptiveBuild custom networks: It does not fit in every scenario. If a customer already has fiber in the building and their provider is giving them the service they want, OnFiber building into that site or knitting together fiber probably isn’t going to be cost-effective. Despite all the building over the last few years, when we talk to customers, the vast majority of them don’t have fiber into the site, or it’s not diverse or they can’t get sites linked together. The key value prop of AdaptiveBuild is, we’ll give you a network that’s custom-designed to your needs. We’re not necessarily going to build it all; we’ll build the pieces necessary. Second, we’ll get it to you faster than other providers.

On the breakdown: I would say about half of the AdaptiveBuild projects we’re doing are wavelength-based. Those are probably evenly split between CWDM and DWDM; it has to do with the amount of capacity needed on the network and the anticipated growth. The other half of the AdaptiveBuild projects are half Sonet, half Ethernet. There are still a lot of customers used to getting private Sonet rings from AT&T or BellSouth.

On drivers: With wavelengths, it’s disaster recovery and business continuity that’s driving the initial purchase, but as that infrastructure is in place, we say, “Hey, you’ve got it in place; if you want to put TDM services over it, you can do that.” It goes from storage and continuity to converged network platforms. You’re starting to see that evolve a little bit.