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Like most businesses, carriers are looking for the right answer to the question of profit and revenue growth. Carriers all agree on the financial destination-success-but they're in turmoil over the right path to take. That confusion has major consequences for buyers and carriers alike.
This question of where the money comes from is a new one for the industry. For years, everybody talked about B2B and the Fortune 2000, and as recently as January I had a discussion with an equipment vendor planner who believed the revenue future lay in Ethernet services. The notion that enterprise data services are the carriers' cash cow is deeply entrenched.
But is it correct? The problem is that intercompany networking isn't a huge data market, and intracompany networking demands multiple sites to network. There just aren't an enormous number of multisite businesses. In the United States, about 150,000 companies have multiple business locations, but only 50,000 of those have significant personnel distributed. There are about 1.5 million secondary business sites, and these have an average per-site data bandwidth of about 124 kbps. Considering there are around 20 million...