Demand for broadband access is expected to skyrocket over the next few years, leading many companies to offer solutions for the first/last mile bottleneck. These multiple solutions, however, have caused interoperability to become a new hurdle in local access. Quantum Bridge Communications offers optical access products for the first mile and is beginning Phase II of its alliance program, which encourages product interoperability. Tony Zona, CEO of Quantum Bridge, recently took time to speak with Toby Weber.

What do you look for in an alliance partner?

No. 1, we look for customer demand. If we go to a prospective customer and they say, `Hey, you should be working with these guys,' then that's the No. 1 draw. No. 2 is, are they in markets or applications that we're not currently in that we can leverage to get our equipment and solutions into...? Three is generally market share - who do we think, and who do the analysts say, has the strongest lead.

What can we expect from the alliance program in the future?

One thing we're looking at strongly is fiber to the home and where that's going. We're also looking strongly at things that are being done in ILECs such as SBC, where they intend to bring fiber deep into residential neighborhoods and then put in neighborhood gateways. That's an opportunity for us to look at, too.

When do you expect FTTH and fiber to the building to become reality?

We're actually seeing it as a reality today. Our customers are rolling out our systems with mass deployments scheduled [in] multiple cities, taking fiber assets that they already have in place that they may have deployed for some other purpose, and taking those [assets] to the building. It's my view - and they obviously share this view - that it's a land grab today, and those that bring fiber to the building first own the revenue stream of that building from that day forward. What the Internet has done has changed the value proposition in telecommunications and pushed value closer to customers. Account control and customer contact is critical to long-term carrier survivability.

What are some obstacles customers are having you address?

Customers, as they change their business plans to look at local access as a key piece of the business and [move] away from backbone and core networking... they're looking for some assistance at how they can accelerate their business plan and best utilize the resources they have available to build out a local infrastructure. So we've built out a local support team with experts in the field who can help them with understanding the local market, understanding the demographics, understanding where the opportunity clusters are and then showing them economically how they can network those customers.