Lit Buildings

In all the blogosphere discussions about Cogent and the VZ Forbearance petitions, the number of lit buildings is getting some discussion. Gary Kim has details here. And Ramblings has 2 articles where he breaks it down. There's about 25,000 buildings lit. And if you consider that at least some of those buildings are lit by more than one carrier especially the telco hotels / collocation centers / metro downtown buildings, well, CLEC's don't have a lot of space covered. In most cases less than 100 buildings.

I often say it is about SELLING DEEP, but not many people listen. The first digital watch costs $1M, according to Seth, so Casio better sell one million of them. Putting fiber in costs anywhere from $7K to $250K depending on where and how far the run is. But the second customer in that building is basically free. And the third is gravy. Get the point?

It works with Wireless as well. I see WISP's put up towers willy-nilly to say they have X number of towers and span Y square miles. Big deal! It's about ROI on each tower; maxing out the number of subs per radio.

On a similar note, many carriers have NO IDEA where their fiber assets are. None. Case in point, this blog post about 1 Summer St in Boston. I run across this every week. Level3 lost an MPLS deal because although every knew there was L3 customers in the CyberCentre, my sales engineer couldn't find it on the list (and has since been given the boot). Keep good maps!