Aiming to drive new revenue from customers with higher-margin potential, service providers are going to new lengths to reach business customers with DSL services.
Meanwhile, Sprint Corp. recently repackaged its business DSL services in 32 of its original 47 U.S. DSL business markets, ratcheting up speeds, enhancing customer service and offering new router equipment to support multiple users per business.
"We are working to enhance the business user experience and widen the gap between what a consumer product looks like and what the business product looks like" for DSL users, says Rich Wonders, BellSouth's senior director of broadband marketing.
"DSL is a way to drive down telephony costs while running a business," notes Ernie Gallo, senior director of DSL deployment solutions at Telcordia Technologies Inc. "HDSL in certain areas is much, much cheaper than T1." The monthly cost of a T1 line in a given market may be in the range of $400, while an HDSL connection would be closer to $80 a month, he says.
Last year, BellSouth introduced three business DSL options. Those include FastAccess for Business, a 1.5mbps downstream/256kbps upstream ADSL connection packaged with five e-mail addresses, 10megabytes of web space and dynamic IP addresses. A second product adds to the first option static IP addresses, which allow users to be found more easily on the web and more quickly authenticated by their remote corporate LAN, explains Wonders. The third business DSL option from BellSouth is FastAccess Telecommute Solution. Targeted for larger corporations, the product combines the base business DSL offer along with software and support tools for corporate administration of the service. BellSouth offers a "differentiated" help desk and on-site installation for all of its business DSL services, adds Wonder.
"Last year we made a strong push into business [DSL] because we already have a strong base of business customers that wanted an alternative [to other DSL providers] from BellSouth," says Wonders. "They liked the technology but wanted the predictability they get from BellSouth. The other motivator is the economics of this -- business products provide higher margins.
"But clearly we recognize we don't have all the [DSL] products we want in the hands of our business customers," he adds, referring to the company's near-term plans to enhance its business DSL offerings.
As for Sprint, its new business DSL service delivers bandwidth of up to 8mbps upstream and 512kbps downstream. The company's original business DSL service announced in September 2001 offered a maximum of 1.5mbps upstream bandwidth and 384kbps downstream connectivity.
The new and improved Sprint Business DSL runs over connections on Sprint's Tier 1 backbone that do not carry residential users. Previously, business DSL ran over a shared platform with residential DSL. It was all backhauled to a Lucent Technologies Inc. Stinger and sent to the backbone, says David Palan director of marketing for Sprint Business DSL.
Sprint provides its business DSL customers in 32 markets a router that offers security and can support an unlimited number of users with dynamic addresses, says Palan. It's a special piece of equipment for which Sprint created the specifications and had an OEM (which Palan declined to name) build. Sprint previously used a broadband modem, which served up to six "static" users, Palan says.
Sprint continues to invite small and medium businesses to try the service for 90 days. If they're not happy with the service, Sprint is offering a full refund on all upfront costs of getting connected. If for any reason the DSL service goes down during that time, Sprint will give the customer a refund on its invoice. Also as before, Sprint Business DSL typically is installed within 30 days of the order. If it takes more than 45 days, Sprint will prorate the service to compensate the customer for its time.
MegaPath Networks Inc., which claims to be the largest DSL provider to the business market, also focuses heavily on the DSL installation process, says Dan Foster, senior vice president of sales and marketing, adding that "ubiquity of footprint" is its other key differentiator.
The company guarantees installation within 30 days or the customer gets the first month of service free.
As for its footprint, MegaPath offers DSL via 3,900 central offices and expects to be in 6,000 COs by year's end. "When we go into an end user, that might be spread up and down the East Coast we can offer at least 75 percent locations more than most of our competitors," says Foster. "They want one supplier [rather than] cobbling together different vendors."
Foster notes that MegaPath has been focused exclusively on business customers since its launch. "When we built the company we designed everything around business, including network engineering, routing, etc.," he says. "We're not trying to cram everyone on the network. We picked numbers we felt from our experience would be acceptable to the business community."
Foster would not provide details as to how MegaPath engineers the network, but he says the company offers SLAs on various parameters such as packet loss and network uptime to users of its symmetric DSL service.
The company also offers VPN solutions and its sales team is familiar with various industries' regulations relating to information security, adds Foster.
| DSL MARKET SNAPSHOT |
U.S. DSL Lines in Service (end 3Q 2001): 3,821,640 Percentage of those lines that were residential: 74 ILEC DSL lines (end 3Q 2001) 3,254,225 Percentage of those lines that were residential: 80 CLEC DSL Lines (end of 3Q 2001) 539,415 Percentage of those lines that were residential: 42 IXC DSL Lines (end of 3Q 2001): 28,000 Percentage of those lines that were residential: 15 Projected Number of DSL Lines at year's end: 2001: 4,542,583 2002: 7,722,392 2003: 11,583,588 2004: 13,900,305 Source: TeleChoice Inc. |
