Being over budget is not usually a good thing, but for Optimum Lightpath, the success of its Metro Ethernet service has led to a faster-than-expected buildout of fiber to businesses in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area that the Cablevision subsidiary serves. This month, the company expects to have “lit” 2000 buildings in the densely populated area.

“Things are going very well for us,” said Kevin Curran, senior vice president of marketing for Optimum Lightpath. “We are a little ahead of schedule in terms of our metrics and how we measure ourselves around Ethernet revenue growth and new customer acquisition. We will light well over 200 buildings this year, which is 40% over budget, but they are all success-based builds. We are acquiring 30 news customers a month, acquiring 20 to 40 buildings a month.”

Optimum Lightpath has become a key part of parent company Cablevision’s competitive battle with Verizon. Chief Operating Officer Tom Rutledge told the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference in September that Lightpath has fiber optic service to twice as many buildings in its metropolitan New York footprint as incumbent Verizon, and counts Verizon Wireless among its customers.

Curran believes Lightpath’s recent growth stems from the company’s move to set standard pricing and products, rather than do customized pricing and service on an individual case basis.

“That enabled us to reduce our selling cycle from roughly 70 days to 55 days,” he said. “We think we will ultimately get that down to about 40 days. And as the brand gets a little more recognized, we are seeing more demand. We have also filled out our product line--our access line speeds used to go from 200 [megabits per second] to 1 [gigabit per second] but we added interim line speeds and a standardized Gig-E service.”

Metro Ethernet products include an E-line point-to-point service at speeds from 10 Mb/s up to 1 Gb/s, an E-LAN multipoint service at speeds in the same range, and a Gig-E storage area networking offer, used to provide optical transport for companies using traditional IBM protocols for SANs.

In addition, Lightpath had planned in September to begin offering a Virtual Line product that enables customers to carve up an E-line into different V-lines to support different services.

The company is also very committed to guaranteed bandwidth performance, Curran said.

“We are not just going to give an SLA [service level agreement] to the largest customers who demand them, although we will have some on individual case basis at the high end for our largest customers who may want more stringent guarantees,” he said. “But we want to put skin in the game and allow our customers to pull up reports. We want to make the payments automatic. From a marketing angle, we have come very strong with a strong messaging position around guaranteed bandwidth. We want to get people comfortable with Ethernet so we are provisioning 100% of the bandwidth we give them--we are not over-subscribing any part of the network.”

As a pioneer of Carrier Ethernet, Optimum Lightpath was recognized by the Metro Ethernet Forum as "Carrier Ethernet Service Provider of the Year – Outstanding Innovation,” in June.

Optimum Lightpath’s current mission is one of education, and the company is determined to push out a message that Ethernet is reliable, available and cost-effective. The Cablevision subsidiary isn’t getting into price wars on Ethernet, Curran added, choosing instead to sell a value message.

“The real reason is we are trying to hold our price position, which was very aggressive a year ago, is that we want to educate our customers about Ethernet’s value,” he said. “This is the first time we have gone a year without lowering prices. We want to add more and more value -- investing in our portal to allow customers to get billing information. We are trying to add more value through the portal and through network performance.”

For instance, Lightpath will be giving customers the ability to add bandwidth through the portal rather than having to call the company first.

While it often goes head to head with Verizon Business on Ethernet in the core business districts such as Manhattan, Optimum Lightpath can often be the only Ethernet alternative in the suburbs where the company has the only fiber link into many office buildings, Curran said.

“Most of these lit buildings are in the suburbs and we are competing against legacy Verizon products there,” he said. “We have a good Ethernet message – number one, it’s pricing and the overall simplicity message. I can simplify my overall network through convergence and downsize. With that simplicity comes savings.”

The biggest challenge to that kind of sale is that it means getting past “the voice guy” to a company’s chief information officer, in order to sell the power of data convergence, Curran said.

Later this year, the company will add VoIP service as it installs gateway and softswitch gear, alongside the Lucent Technologies’ 5ESS voice switch it installed in 1994.