NPG wants to serve businesses; Cable company targeting regional commercial market

By Ric Swats

River Cities Business Journal

NPG Cable Inc. is challenging to become the top telecommunications provider in the region with a host of new features and a new network aimed at supplying the needs of business.

The cable TV company's recently-formed Commercial/Government Sales & Marketing Department is addressing the needs of the region as NPG makes the shift from residential to commercial services.

“Cable was originally a residential service, TV only,” Roberto M. Torrez, NPG Cable's director of commercial/government sales and marketing for Arizona and California, said. “Now we provide video, telephone and the Internet.

“All those products and services have evolved and cable companies are competing with the phone companies and the Internet companies.”

The leap from providing cable TV to residential areas to providing telephone, Internet and video services to commercial areas is huge.

The first challenge is that most cable TV service went to residential areas, not commercial areas. That means new lines must be installed in commercial areas before service can be offered.

There is also a huge volume of traffic between the heavily populated areas in the region, which means there must be trunk lines that cover the county.

“We are in the process of completing SONET, which stands for Synchronous Optical Network, that will link Lake Havasu City, Bullhead City and Kingman,” Torrez said. “It takes fiber optic cable and creates counter-rotating rings. In case of interruption with in five milliseconds it will switch. It is instant disaster recovery technology.”

What this means for the end user is that when service is disrupted they are unlikely to notice, because it will be back online so quickly.

While that is nice for a home user, for business it is something will become a required feature in the near future.

NPG Cable is targeting a broad market, from the largest consumers to the smallest businesses.

“We're taking a different approach than on the residential side because the needs of business are different,” Torrez said. “Bandwidth is determined by the needs of the customer. We can provide the bandwidth they require up to a gigabyte.

“If we have a medical application for example, where a center has doctors or commuters who are working off-site, they may require a five or 10 or 20 gig connection because they are loading such big files. We can do that where we can give them 10 megs up and 10 megs down.”

Most Internet service providers upload and download at different speeds so while it may take only a few seconds to download a large file when a large file is being sent out it may take two to three times as long. NPG can offer a choice of speeds on both ends of the spectrum.

And, while most people consider video and Internet service the primary components of the package, NPG also offers phone service.

“Our service is fully digital,” Torrez said. “On average what we've seen thus far is we're able to save our customers somewhere on average of $300 to $400 a year.”

The changes in capability stem from new technology, but the change in offerings stem from the 1996 telephone deregulation act.

“While businesses are becoming more dependent on advanced communications and information management services, competitive activity in the communications market place keeps growing, and the sophistication of both customers and vendors is growing at the same time,” Torrez said. “We provide commercial and government accounts an alternative to ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier). In Bullhead City and Kingman and Lake Havasu City that ILEC if Frontier.

“We're the other phone company.”