Brian Rose

Brian Rose joined Cox Communications as product development manager after seven years with BellSouth and has found selling Ethernet services can be more fun when you aren’t cannibalizing your existing base of data services. Just after the Vertical Systems Group report credited Cox with fourth place nationally in the sales of Ethernet ports with 10% of the market, Rose spoke with Editor-in-Chief Carol Wilson.

On Ethernet market trends: The majority of our growth in Ethernet is coming from replacement of other technologies. That’s what’s got me excited. We don’t have to worry about the cannibalization piece. We don’t have to cross-justify writing down other business services. We can just go in and make a very strong case for our Ethernet offering.

On what is driving Ethernet success: Anyone’s lying if they don’t admit price is the number-one driver, but the second piece is simplicity. Ninety-eight percent of LANs are running Ethernet, so business customers have a familiarity with it. With legacy telecom services, they had to put all their faith in the service provider to handle it for them.

On the Cox advantage: People are looking for a choice, like we found when we did Internet and when we did phone service. From a competitive advantage, the local perspective is that customer service is always a primary driver for us and for our customers. The focus we have placed on that at Cox and driving next-generation technologies have been beneficial for us.
I was surprised how forward-looking [Cox] is on a lot of things we do. We have had a project to move our backbone services from leased rings to the wholly owned backbone we managed ourselves with dense wave division, etc. We are willing to put the capital required to make sure our network has the capacity and can deliver the quality of service our customers expect.

On what differentiates Ethernet services: Price again, obviously, is a big driver. Second to that, I think they are looking for that reliability and the simplicity play that Ethernet provides them. A lot of companies are caught in that gap – they need to upgrade, but there are jump-off points with most TDM services. Companies get to maxing out their T-1 and want to go to the next level. Some incumbents offer sub-rate DS-3 services, but some don’t, and DS-3 is a lot more expensive than T-1. Ethernet offers a more economic alternative with more bandwidth.

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