In an effort to unify the commercial services divisions of RCN, Grande Communications and Wave Broadband, Patrick Knorr this week was promoted to the position of chief commercial officer and EVP of commercial services for the newly combined company.
Knorr chatted with CED about his new role and goals for the commercial side of the business.
Knorr said his main focus, both short- and long-term, is working to leverage the assets of the combined company as much as possible to become a competitive national provider for commercial telecom.
Together, RCN, Wave and Grande have more than 10,000 buildings on-net and more than 20,000 miles of fiber in place, much of it metro fiber.
“We really think that we’re well positioned to provide competitive alternatives to both enterprise customers and other carriers for last-mile connectivity throughout our footprint,” Knorr said.
The first order of business, Knorr said, is organizing and unifying the three entities’ back-end infrastructure to support that opportunity.
With RCN covering Chicago and the northeast, Grande in Texas and Wave on the west coast, the company’s combined footprint spans nearly 20 metro areas in 11 states.
While integration can be a challenge, Knorr said he believes success is always a matter of communication and trying to enhance the combined operation, “without taking away anything from the good work that’s being done individually at all these companies.”
One aspect of the combined company’s assets that Knorr said makes it somewhat unique from other competitive fiber providers is that it has both rural network, as well as metro networks.
“That’s our goal, both with our extensive fiber footprint and working with other partners is to provide regional turnkey connectivity solutions,” Knorr said.
The commercial services segment currently accounts for roughly 20 percent of the combined company’s business, but Knorr said that is growing every year and he anticipates continued double-digit growth for the foreseeable future.
When it comes to growth opportunities, Knorr pointed to increasingly greater bandwidth demands in a time when big data is key.
“This is really the era of big data, whether that’s CDN networks, connectivity with data centers and the cloud, 5G networks,” he noted. “The one thing that’s for certain is more and more applications requiring higher and higher bandwidth speeds.”
However, when it comes to what commercial customers want, some things stay the same.
“People want reliable service, they want it as quickly as they can get it and the most capacity they can get for the best value,” Knorr said. “That really hasn’t changed in over a decade.”
The thing that has changed, according to Knorr, is the volume of demands that customers are looking for. “But at the end of the day it’s all about having a fast reliable pipe and that core of the business has not changed.”
Following his appointment, Knorr promoted Paul Koss to SVP of carrier and wholesale. He said that business of delivering services and providing transport to other telecom carriers will be another great niche for the company to drive growth.
Looking ahead, five years down the line, Knorr said the aim is to position the company as a serious national player for commercial telecom.
“I think we’re growing rapidly, we have a very large footprint and again, with the growth in volume across the industry I think there’s a lot of opportunity to grow market share – both in serving enterprise customers and making our network available to other carriers as well,” Knorr noted.
