Though by birthright it belongs in the RBOC family along with AT&T and Verizon Communications, Qwest Communications is almost universally seen as a lesser sibling. Past financial difficulties have done their part to create that perception, but the fact that Qwest doesn’t own a wireless network and is an IPTV follower also help perpetuate it. But, Qwest sees the enterprise market as the venue in which it can begin to change peoples’ minds. Neil Cox, vice president of the Chicago-based central region for the business markets group at Qwest, recently spoke with Telephony’s Dan O’Shea about the company enterprise aspirations and capabilities.

On how he joined Qwest: I was with Ameritech back in the days when the company was run by [current Qwest CEO] Dick Notebaert. I was one of the officers who helped build the international business and I was on the wholesale side. When we sold the company to SBC, everybody went their separate ways. I was out in California at SAIC, which owned Telcordia for a time. I came back to Chicago to join [venture capital firm] MK Capital. I got the call from Qwest about seven months ago.

On Qwest’s enterprise hopes: We already do four billion VoIP minutes per month on our network and as you know, we built an IP network from the start. A lot of enterprise companies are in that transition now where they want to go to IP because there is so much more they can do with it, and be free of TDM. For us to go from something like OC-192 to OC-768 is not a forklift upgrade. We acquired OnFiber last year and they have fiber lit in a lot of buildings—about 17 cities that our outside of our traditional LEC region. We’re able to get within 500 feet of 65% of all the businesses in Chicago. Our company is financially secure now, and the majority of our capital dollars are now being spent in the enterprise space. We’re very focused on disaster recovery, ‘Gig E,’ storage networking requirements. We want to double our market share there in the next two years.

On AT&T winning a five-year global networking contract from General Motors this week: The enterprises that have AT&T or Verizon now—we’d like to become their primary carrier. We can get in their as a second carrier and grow. We’re fairly priced and we don’t have legacy network baggage or an acquisition we’re trying to pay for. In the global market, I don’t think we lose out to them because we can get everywhere everyone else can. We all have partners when you get to the last mile [in other countries]. No one owns all the end points. It’s your partners and business relationships that get things done.