• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Conservative Nature Helps Bedford, N.H.-Based Lightship Telecom Remain on Top

Posted on: Thursday, 5 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 5--BEDFORD, N.H. -- With one of its competitors having fallen out of the market, Lightship Telecom has remained on top of the telecommunications game in New England.

How do they do it?

"We have been conservative in everything we have done," said Tom Worcester, Lightship's sales executive.

It is Lightship's conservative nature that has kept it afloat in the drowning world of telecommunications.

The $55 million company, based in Bedford, is a provider of voice and data solutions, such as high-speed Internet, local and long-distance telephone service, e-mail, Web hosting and conference calling, to corporations and organizations across New England.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up the telecom industry to competition and virtually eliminated the barriers to entering the market.

When it went into effect, the dominating regional telecom carriers, such as Verizon and BellSouth, were forced to share their networks with smaller, local competitors at discounted rates.

In 1997, Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs) started popping up all over the country, in effect saturating the telecom market.

As a result of what Lightship's Manager of Corporate Communications Chip Underhill called "overaggressive expansion," most of those smaller competitors have since been forced to desperately lower their rates, sometimes resulting in excessively low and often times negative profit margins. This, in turn, forces the companies to lay off employees and in some cases, file for bankruptcy.

Currently the fallout rate for CLECs is about 85 percent, according to Lightship sales executive Tom Worcester. Many times this is due to companies trying to acquire lines without trying to determine first if it's profitable, he said.

Unlike many of its competitors, Lightship has successfully expanded its services and increased its customer and employee bases every year it has been in business.

One of the reasons for the company's success was its prudent expansion as it acquired new technology, according to Lightship executives.

The company, which began its service and headquarters originated in Nashua, has slowly expanded its network to areas of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and just recently into Rhode Island.

"By doing it slowly, the foundation of the house (Lightship) is strong," Underhill said.

According to Executive Vice President of Marketing and Customer Relations Rainer Gawlick, many telecommunications companies fail because they tend to adopt the newest technology too quickly. This fails many times because the technology "is not robust enough for the mainstream."

"We didn't pick new technology before it was ready and we didn't overexpend ourselves," Gawlick said. As DSL, or digital subscriber line, became more popular, the company did not put it all its emphasis on adopting that, but instead relied on its T-1 lines.

The other reason for Lightship's continued success is its privately owned network.

"We built our own network. That's why we're still alive today," Underhill said.

Through the Telecommunications Act, regional carriers were forced to lease lines of its networks, called UNE-P (Unbundled Network Elements Platform), to its competitors.

Lightship's network is not dependent on UNE-P, according to Underhill.

Unlike most smaller telecom providers, Lightship is not outsourced. In fact, it owns all of the equipment associated with its services.

The company only pays Verizon for access to what executives call "the last mile" -- the part of the Verizon network that connects the telecom cable lines in the ground to the building receiving Lightship services.

Lightship is now in the top 10 percent of CLECs in the U.S., providing services to organizations such as the U.S. Postal Service in Maine, Southern New Hampshire University, the Boston Public Library, and the entire U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Their coverage reaches over 80 percent of the businesses in their five-state region.

"Our goal is to be the premier alternative to Verizon in New England," Gawlick said.

In the coming years, Lightship hopes to continue to strengthen its network in New England, but has no plans to expand south.

-----

To see more of The Telegraph, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.nashuatelegraph.com

(c) 2004, The Telegraph, Nashua, N.H. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

VZ, BLS,

More News in this Category