Lightpath, the business services arm of Cablevision Systems, is making a major move on Verizon in New York, with a significant restructuring of its services and tighter integration with its parent company.

The service restructuring follows the transformation of the CLEC from a SONET-based TDM fiber optic network to an all-Ethernet network that will gradually become an all-optical Ethernet network, as SONET-based services are completely phased out. Lightpath's 25,000 route miles of fiber go directly into 1700 buildings, and in 80% of those buildings, it is the only fiber connection.

Next week, Lightpath will announce a new Metropolitan Continuity service that takes advantage of a unique fiber route built by Lightpath that crosses the Hudson River 60 miles north of Manhattan, giving the service provider a fully redundant fiber ring not dependent on one of the major tunnels into the city.

In June, Cablevision and Lightpath will make an even more significant move, announcing tighter integration of the business CLEC into Cablevision's Optimum brand that recognizes a blurring of the lines between business and residential high-speed data services.

The result of all this activity, said Current Analysis analyst Brian Washburn, will be headaches for Verizon executives in the New York area.

"It should be keeping Verizon executives in New York City awake at night," he said. "It gets to be pretty scary in terms of what they are capable of doing."

Tying Lightpath more tightly into Optimum will enable Cablevision Systems to market services to small and mid-sized business and to offer larger businesses options such as supporting work-at-home throughout the region while receiving a single bill. Lightpath has been operating its all-fiber network for 17 years and has well-established relationships with business customers, particularly in the medical, government and financial communities.

"The Optimum brand is known for really high-speed residential services," said Washburn. "They can do some really interesting things such as fractional T-1, and they can get around the whole leased line issue and really go heavy into small to medium business markets, especially because Cablevision has VoIP."

The move to Ethernet went faster than initially planned, said Kevin Curran, senior vice president of marketing for Lightpath, which will add another 125 buildings to its fiber network this year. The company stopped selling TDM to new customers in January, and pared its 3000 different tariffed and special access services down to 30 products, or five discrete offerings at six different speeds.

"Our new strategy is trying to get us away from me-too services," says Curran. "We have services that no one else can replicate."

The Metropolitan Continuity service is based in part on an asset Lightpath believes no other carrier can duplicate--a fiber link across the Long Island sound to Westchester County along a utility company right of way. For environmental reasons, carriers are not being allowed to bury cable in that sound, said Curran. The network crosses the Hudson River 60 miles north of Manhattan, instead of using right-of-way through one of the tunnels that cross into the island.

The purpose of the service is to guarantee business continuity in the greater New York City area without having to route traffic through the heart of downtown. In the post-9/11 era, businesses are looking for more distributed facilities, and ones that don't have a major point of vulnerability.

"What makes this whole thing work is that we've gotten tremendous recognition in customer satisfaction," said Brian Fabiano, senior vice president of network services for New York metro area. "We're able to do it because of the way that network was constructed--we own every piece of it, we control costs and the customer experience."

Lightpath operates 500-plus SONET rings within its service territory, which includes the New York City metro area, Long Island, Northern New Jersey and part of Connecticut. The company established separate frame relay, ATM and TDM networks, complete with Class 5 switches.

"Over the past 18 months, we architected what we think is a next-gen network," said Fabiano.

Using Nortel's Optera product to create an optical core, Lightpath established 32 protected wavelengths, each of which is 10-gigabit enabled. Much of the distribution network is still SONET-based, but that is changing over time.

"Everything new is optical and we'll consume the existing SONET capacity with Ethernet over SONET," he said. "We are deploying carrier-grade Ethernet products, with 50 millisecond recovery. It's SONET-like Ethernet."