Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is RCN?Mr. Aquino: RCN was born out of the 1996 Telecom Act that provided for competition in the local exchange for telephone service, as well as for breaking down the monopolies on the cable side. From the start, RCN had a unique opportunity to deliver a bundled service offering including high-quality voice telephony, television and high-speed data. RCN built metropolitan fiber rings in our markets specifically for this purpose. Today, we have 130 cable licenses in the United States covering the District of Columbia, Eastern Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, suburbs of Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and some small segments in California, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We also own 49% of the largest cable company in Mexico called Megacable, with about 600,000 customers. Domestically, RCN has about 410,000 customers, and we are very proud to be one of the first and most successful triple play companies in the country offering services on one platform over a very robust hybrid-fiber-coax network. Our unique network offers high bandwidth services and is one of the few with a fiber architecture that provides not only residential service, but also commercial service. RCN's annual revenue is roughly $565 million; about 10% of our $85 million-$95 million EBITDA comes from our commercial business serving enterprises and carriers. We have our own facilities underground in the streets of DC, Boston and New York, a civil work that was constructed over the life of the company since 1997. During those years, we dug up the streets to build SONET rings in the metropolitan areas of these major markets in our country. These markets tend to have good demographics for the triple play. We provide a variety of entertainment and communications services that are customized for this high-density customer base. Our voice services run on circuit-switched platforms that are similar to those of the RBOCs. Today we are migrating to voice over IP as an overlay to our circuit-switched platform, giving us the best of both worlds in terms of reliability and E911 capability. Our high-speed data service for our residential customers is one of the fastest in the country in terms of download and upload speeds. Many of our customers have HSD service at 10 megabits down. We are currently testing 20 megabits down and 2 megabits up and having success. Our HFC network is built to 150-home nodes that allow us to deliver high bandwidth to our customers, providing more flexibility for high end applications when demanded. This capability far exceeds our competitors in almost all cases. When it comes to data speed and applications, RCN is one of the most innovative in the country.
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