Combining to bring last-mile Ethernet services to businesses across Southern California, Covad Communications Group and CENX said they will partner to offer wholesale carrier Ethernet services to operators.
CENX, which calls itself the world’s first carrier-Ethernet exchange, will offer Covad’s Ethernet-over-copper services through its Los Angeles exchange, which brings operators together to buy and sell carrier Ethernet connections. Since its merger with MegaPath in March, Covad has aggressively targeted the wholesale last-mile Ethernet market. It now offers Ethernet covering more than 10 million businesses in 240 metropolitan areas across the country.
As operators seek to slake soaring demand for high-speed connectivity to businesses of all sizes, carrier Ethernet has become an increasingly important alternative to costly fiber build-outs.
Today, “only 18 to 20 percent of commercial buildings in the U.S. have access to fiber,” pointed out Jeff Brown, vice president of carrier services at Covad, in a phone interview. “That means four out of five don’t have the ability to get fiber, but they still need broadband services. That provides an opportunity for a company like Covad that has tremendous coverage and the network to provide those kinds of services to fill that void in last-mile access for other carriers.”
Founded last year by Metro Ethernet Forum president Nan Chen and Ron Gavillet, a former executive with Neutral Tandem, CENX is designed to solve the growing problem of Carrier Ethernet interconnection. The company has opened three Carrier Ethernet exchanges, in Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago. According to Chen, more than 5 million locations are now accessible through CENX’s exchanges, and that number is expected to top 10 million by mid-2010.
Infonetics Research reported last year that the ability for service providers to quickly and economically interconnect with their peers could add as much as $4.7 billion to the global Ethernet revenue forecast in 2013, reaching nearly $39 billion.
