Much of the Charter Communications plant was designed and constructed to efficiently serve residential communities and simply does not pass many of the commercial sites. In fact, a substantial percentage of businesses may not be economically reachable by cable plant architectures. These percentages vary by market, based on network footprint and local business demographics. These ratios or reduction factors were determined by overlaying D&B commercial addresses on network maps to calculate network proximity. Charter Communications Internet employed 6 test markets to validate the technique and to estimate the “addressable” market or that within the reach of our plant.
The current market climate for high-speed data services is excellent. Growth rates continue to remain high despite the general slow down in the technology and telecommunications sectors. On a year-over-year basis, growth rates can range as high as 40 percent to 100 percent per year. Demand is very strong, particularly in secondary and tertiary markets where telephone companies are not paying much attention to small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers. In these areas, customers have little or no choices, broadband facilities are scarce and prices for service are high.
Another characteristic of the commercial market is the brand effect from residential charter internet service. This highlights the importance of achieving high levels of customer care in both the residential and commercial sectors. Since 1996, the beginning of commercial service operations in its North Central Region, charter broadband internet has never lost a fiber-based customer until this year. The loss was the result of an acquisition of the customer by a carrier.
Charter Comunications Network benefits
Charter Communications’s HFC networks are clearly the unrecognized heroes of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Unbundled network elements (UNEs) and UNE-Ps are not the kind of competition desired by the Act, which legislators and the FCC are discovering. Cable is the only real facilities-based, wireline competition to the local telephone companies in the local access arena. And now that broadband is growing in popularity, high-speed data connections to the Internet have become an essential element of any businesses infrastructure.
Our HFC plant is poised for extraordinary success as we offer high-speed Internet access, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and transparent local area network (LAN) services at speeds and flexibility beyond that of the phone companies. Once linked across regions and the country, these powerful access networks together represent the only viable competitor to the established telecommunications infrastructure. Our challenge is to make it happen and to prevent the local telephone companies from legislating barriers to its success
Serving the commercial sector is synergistic with network growth and evolution for cable operators. From the beginning of offering commercial services, Charter Communications Internet garnered large network contracts that, in part, helped fund headend consolidation. Extensions of fiber to smaller towns to serve one or two large businesses enabled rebuilds and the collapsing of headends further.
Although the demographics may be unique in the Wisconsin area, over time, [ccd] was able to complete a statewide fiber-optic network ring that carries a synchronous optical network (SONET) architecture. This ring enabled providing carrier class network reliability across the state. As we expand Charter Business Network’s services across other areas of the company, the same fiber optic network opportunities are evident.