FUTURES

Brightspeed COO Tom Maguire, and procurement and supply chain VP Brenda Rapp, discuss how a build plan lay behind an overnight success.

n the opening day’s business at the fifthlargest incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) in the US, Brightspeed’s customers barely noticed the transition from their former provider, says COO and executive VP Tom Maguire.

“People went to sleep one day as a customer of Lumen Technologies and woke up the next as customers of Brightspeed – which is good news!” says Tom, explaining it was the culmination of three years of hard work behind the scenes. Looking forward, Brightspeed will offer many of those customers stateof-the-art fibre optics networks in a service territory made up of rural and suburban communities across 20 states.

Tom, who has 40 years of experience in the telecoms business, was brought on board early in the process with fellow founding Brightspeed leaders, chief administration officer Chris Creager and chief executive officer Robert (Bob) Mudge. Tom talks through how they were approached by investors Apollo Global Management with an interesting proposition.

“Apollo’s leaders had a hypothesis where, if they invested in a company that had a copper infrastructure, they could turn around the fortunes of the company by moving everyone over to fibre,” says Tom. He goes on to reveal that Apollo put together a $7.5billion fund and invited the trio initially to do due diligence and identify a property that fitted the bill, and then stay on to make the process work.

Brenda Rapp, who was then Lumen’s senior director of global network equipment and technology procurement, was one of the Lumen employees who came onboard with the deal.

The territory Brightspeed acquired runs across the Midwest, Southeast, and parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but has no major metropolis.

“We cover roughly 6.5 million households, a million or more of which use us for their residential and small business telecom needs,” says Tom. Though the objective was to bring innovation into their customers’ lives and make the business profitable, Tom emphasises that there was another key priority – service of the kind that rural communities rarely had access to.

Brenda, newly promoted to vicepresident of procurement and supply chain, says until now the focus has been on stabilising what existed and making sure that the new company has all it needs to ensure legacy business runs smoothly and good customer experience is maintained.

“We are doing that by getting critical spares to the field quickly. A lot of my focus right now is on our supply chain. Tom’s team put together a five-year build plan, which makes it a lot easier for us to plan for equipment, supply and everything else we need. With a build plan in place for 2023 to 2027, we know exactly what locations, markets, and wire centres Tom’s teams plan to build. We have standard architecture, standard equipment bill of materials and we can provide accurate forecasts, put purchase orders in and get the deliveries to support the fibre build teams,” explains Brenda.

Tom likens the process to an iceberg, where only a tip is visible. The biggest part of the preparation to make such a deal work lies below the waterline, unseen.

Running the fifth-largest ILEC in the US clearly gives Tom a buzz. Delighted with the transition he says, “We pulled all of this off despite being in the middle of a pandemic when the vast majority of our teams were never in the same room.” He has never lost his enthusiasm for telecoms.

“It’s an interesting industry,” he says. “It involves legal, regulatory

Central Office

• Calix OLTs

• Network Routers

• Backhaul Network and supply chain and it’s a highly integrated, highly diverse business.”

Tom goes on to detail how Brightspeed is running its new network. “The Brightspeed Fibre product is a fairly new architecture with a new suite of operational and building support systems. That’s the start-up piece of the equation and things are going well,” Tom continues, adding that the whole enterprise is feel-good. The planned architecture includes a ‘plug-and-play’ model to minimise the expense associated with traditional fibre splicing.

“Reducing our cost per location allowed us to do more build,” says Tom, highlighting that on top of the $7.5bn Apollo paid to set up the company, it invested another $2bn to roll out the fibre infrastructure that Tom says will be transformative.

“There are a lot of studies around people’s educational or business opportunities, but I talk to customers living in rural America whose lives depend on really strong connectivity that just doesn’t exist in the copper world,” says Tom.

Brenda says that the new procurement, purchasing and supply chain organisation involved collaborating with 35 fellow professionals while negotiating and executing more than 450 supplier contracts. As Tom puts it, you can’t just go to a local hardware store to pick up telecoms company supply needs, so he credits the early faith of partners such as Calix with being part of that enablement. “Calix is providing our OLTs or optical line terminals and ONTs, optical network terminals, and wifi-6 mesh towers,” he says.

“We standardised on things because of supply chain issues, especially relating to fibre infrastructure. There’s a lot of demand for electronics associated with fibre, so about a year before the transaction [with Lumen] closed we went to major providers and told them what we wanted,” Tom continues. “There are only a few manufacturers and we had certain criteria for who would work best for our planned fibre build.” The pandemic led to the decision to near-shore and avoid transportation issues that were dogging existing providers. “We wanted to stick with certain companies and manufacture in North America as much as possible,” he says. Having a long employment history in the industry, Chris, Bob and Tom already knew many suppliers.

“We sat down with them and told them what we were looking for,” he says. “We were trying to build as quickly as possible and we are still looking to ramp things up,” says Tom. The same kind of process is in place with partner Corning. “We told them what we needed and how much we thought we would need, and they said they could support us as well.”

Having made the transition between Lumen and Brightspeed herself, Brenda emphasises that in her area of work good planning is a key to success. “It is refreshing to know that the investment for growth is here,” she says. “The company culture, financial backing and management support to execute and place orders far in advance, to ensure that we have what we need when we need it – well, that doesn’t happen in a lot of companies.”

Brenda says, “It’s really nice to go to work for a company that has a higher purpose rather than one that focuses just on making money and putting products ‘out there’. There’s a higher mission in terms of delivering high speed internet and infrastructure based on investment in infrastructure that these underserved areas haven’t seen previously.”

A former New Yorker who now lives in Florida, Tom admits he had assumed everybody in the US had cell phone connectivity, laughing as he adds: “Even my 87-year-old mother has a cell phone!” On a more serious note, Tom points out that in his experience his mother’s demographic has embraced online and side lined old-style voice service. “They shop, and they don’t worry about getting to a store because they click on something and order it, and it just shows up!” he says.

Brenda is quick to credit Brightspeed’s partners for helping the company provide such customers – existing and future –with the right equipment to make interconnectivity the stuff of the everyday. To illustrate, Tom pulls up a graphic showing the fibre network running in parallel with the copper network. He highlights Zyxel as a key partner in this.

“Zyxel has been around a long time and is very reliable in supporting our legacy business,” he says. “Even once we are done with the initial fibre plan, assuming that we don’t add to it, we can only build out to about half of the households that we have and that means some customers will still be served with copper, so it’s important to me that we maintain relationships with them,” he says. Even with capital made available through the US