Cablevision’s Vision

By Rich Terhani

Optimum Lightpath division of the Cablevision Systems Corporation (www.optimumlightpath.com) is now a major presence in Ethernet-based communication solutions for small and medium-sized businesses in the New York metropolitan area.

I recently spoke with Optimum (News - Alert) Lightpath’s Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Management, John Macario, who told me how Optimum Lightpath offers a full line of metro Ethernet transport products, and a set of voice services right on top of that.

As Macario says, "Here at Cablevision it’s all about building a product line that’s taking us up-market and deepening our relationships with customers. We have recently launched a hosted voice product that we think is unique not because of any feature functionality — frankly, it’s no different than anything Verizon (News - Alert) or AT&T has got — but it’s packaged in a way that I think is unique in the industry. We’re selling it for a single monthly recurring charge for certain company sizes, such as 50, 75, 100, up to 300 seats. The package includes all of the IP endpoints. We deal with LAN assessment and LAN remediation. It includes all of the customer premise equipment required to remediate the customer’s LAN, all of the servicers for installing and configuring the system, along with 7x24 flaw or break-fix care on anything we put on the customer premise, and there’s no upfront charge for any of it. If you buy our transport product, we’ll sell you 50 seats of hosted VoIP for $749 a month with no other charges, which comes out to roughly $15 for a full-featured voice seat. I don’t think anybody else has an offer anywhere near to ours."

Of course, the company focuses on businesses in their footprint, but Macario says that, while the footprint is geographically constrained, they’re pretty happy that it’s a big, rich and densely-populated one.

"We do have some transport customers off-net, but that’s the exception rather than the rule," says Macario. "Ideal customers for us are things like hospitals — big, regional businesses. Right now 98 percent of the hospitals on Long Island are Optimum Lightpath customers and 70 percent of the hospitals across our footprint are Lightpath customers. They need high bandwidth, low-latency, committed information rates circuits, to get information from one place to another. Many of them also use our voice services. We do offer what amounts to a TDM trunking product that we bundle in. The starting point for Lightpath Hosted Voice including Internet is $3,498 per month. This covers 50 seats with 50,000 minutes of use and 20 MB of bandwidth each month. This includes basic Cisco/Linksys equipment. If you do the arithmetic on that, if you’re currently running on copper and PRIs, we can blow that away. Medical is one of our fastest-growing verticals."

"The Government is also becoming a big market for us," says Macario. "Education is up-and-coming as well. Right now, financial services may not sound interesting or exciting, but we’re actually doing really well in that field too, since they’ve spread their operations across our footprint, moving facilities originally situated in Manhattan, say, and moving them to Jersey City."

"Three basic principles underlie all of our products," says Macario. "First, the pricing must be simple and easy to understand. Second, none of our products or pricing must resemble anything offered by a typical phone company – no incremental charges, for example. Special configurations cost a bit more, of course. Third, we enter markets where we can price disruptively. We’re not particularly interested in competing 'around the edges' for half a percent market share. If we’re entering into a market with our data connectivity services, our interesting video transport services, our many voice services and other managed services including unified communications that we’re bringing online — we do it to take a significant share of the market. We want to do as well in new markets as we already do in the medical market."

Telcos beware, Cablevision’s Optimum Lightpath (News - Alert) division is one aggressive player.

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