Cincinnati Bell is betting its future on growing its fiber-optic network that entertains consumers at home and lets private industry conduct business at 100 times the speed of typical broadband connections.
While the regional phone company dates back to 1873, it’s playing a critical role bringing cutting-edge technology and information-age infrastructure to the region as it seeks to transform itself.
The company also is raising its profile, moving 600 jobs into its expanding downtown headquarters. By fall, the company will emblazon its name on the city’s skyline as the building’s signature tenant.
“Our company’s been around for 140 years — you’re not around that long without reinventing yourself a few times,” said CEO Ted Torbeck. “This is just another reinvention.”
Reinvention is necessary after Cincinnati Bell spun off one and sold off another promising growth vehicle in the past two years. Parting with those ventures involved tough choices, but Cincinnati Bell may finally recover from its nearly fatal foray into the 1990s telecom bubble.
The last surviving regional Bell company, Cincinnati Bell’s legacy business is steadily fading into history as households and businesses eschew landline phone lines for mobile service.
The company’s traditional business from voice service via telephone lines has dwindled from $519.8 million in 2004 to $203.4 million last year — accounting for just 15.9 percent of the company’s $1.3 billion in revenues.
To replace that lost revenue, Cincinnati Bell has remade itself into a data mover and an entertainment and Internet service provider through its increasing deployment of fiber cable.
As consumers and businesses become increasingly dependent on multiple electronic devices operating at the same time, more of them need fiber to carry all the data at once.
Fiber-optic cable transmits signals through a glass core much faster and over greater distances than conventional copper cable lines. Because the glass core doesn’t generate electricity, fiber also isn’t subject to interference from power lines.
Local consumers are familiar with Cincinnati Bell’s fiber-connected Fioptics brand service that provides Internet service and entertainment channels to 91,000 homes and businesses in the region, compared with 11,000 in 2009.
The company also leverages its fiber network to service businesses in the region: Picture a law firm with a huge case file that needs to be stored via the cloud but must remain quickly accessible; or a local marketing firm that needs to stream high-resolution videos of its latest campaign with clients.
Cincinnati Bell has provided speedy fiber-optic service to major corporations such as Procter & Gamble and General Electric for decades, but it is now deploying increasingly to smaller businesses.
The company has connected 5,800 commercial buildings in the region with fiber-based services.
The fiber roll-out mimics similar efforts for faster, smarter Internet services in a handful of other U.S. cities by players such as Google Fiber that economic development officials believe will provide a critical edge in attracting new companies, entrepreneurs and jobs to the region.
“Fiber is essential — our entire business operates on its connection to the outside world,” said Connor Bowlan, the co-founder of Cintric, a consumer insight startup in Over-The-Rhine.
Last fall, Cincinnati Bell announced it would speed up its plans to install fiber throughout the region.
“They’re going all-in on this venture,” said David Burks, an analyst with Hilliard Lyons. “It’s their most important initiative.”
