Independent Telcos tend to serve a higher percentage of residential customers than business customers, so when they pursue an edge-out strategy, acting as a CLEC outside their home turf, they tend to pursue a primarily residential strategy, too. One exception is IdeaOne Telecom in North Dakota.

The company has the backing of a local electric cooperative, Cass County Electric, and a consortium of three local telephone companies — Dakota Central Rural Telephone Co-op, North Dakota Telephone Co. and United Telephone Mutual Aid Corp. — known collectively as North Dakota Telecom. Since its 1999 launch in Fargo, N.D., IdeaOne has emphasized the business market.

Bob Johnson, CEO of IdeaOne, said the company has thrived well into its 10th year by staying its original course, which is to invest in infrastructure through a facilities-based approach, with a strategic focus on the business sector. Through its own fiber optic and switch-based facilities, IdeaOne provides business services to companies along the 14-node sites of its fiber route. These businesses include everything from schools and hospitals to banks and Main Street corporations. As people need to connect their businesses on multipoint locations, IdeaOne comes in with the ability to do that both in the community and with other carriers in the region and nation.

“The majority of our success is business,” Johnson said. “We are solutions-based. We almost went bankrupt when things were very lean and mean in 2001, and we shifted gears. … We have invested in the infrastructure in the community we serve versus just using Qwest's loop.

“Our success has been that, as we have been able to determine or identify a need, our investors, being a local North Dakota company, are willing to put in and expand our infrastructure to meet the needs of the community we serve.”

IdeaOne has been leveraging fiber technologies and Ethernet over fiber to deliver its business services. In the business market, as in the residential market, customers increasingly are looking to access multimedia services — and although historically carriers had to run separate networks for residential and business services, IdeaOne chose to rely on a single network to support multiple services and multiple customer types.

“To the extent those business models are starting to converge, the most efficient way to deliver is the highest-capacity service over a single network,” said Geoff Burke, marketing director for Calix, which supplies equipment underlying IdeaOne's network.

“They really are representative to us of a new generation of communication service provider that is basically pursuing a very lean but operationally efficient business model to address their market,” Burke said. Because IdeaOne's model is primarily focused on business, he said, “It allows them to have a very keen, strong focus. It also allows them to really take advantage of common technologies throughout their network and be very efficient in how they deploy it.”

Johnson cited Calix's cost-effective equipment as another reason the CLEC is able to provide the services it does. He said it gives IdeaOne the ability to meet today's bandwidth requirements and positions it to continue to meet them as they grow and change.

Potential regulatory issues could be a problem, however. Johnson said that franchise restrictions imposed by the FCC limit his company, and it can't move into video until those restrictions are lifted. Once that day comes, IdeaOne will make business decisions about which parts of town it will begin overbuilding.

“In time, you never know where the business will go,” Johnson said. “In our community, I think our challenge as we go forward and continue to grow is the new services. One of our limitations is the cable TV franchise issue. If the cable companies can now offer phone, in time we are hoping to offer the video piece. Calix positions us for that, but we don't have deep-enough pockets to overbuild the communities we serve.”