Windstream's Gardner: Enhance focus on business, wireless backhaul and broadband services - FierceTelecom

Windstream Communications is no longer content to just be the local telephone company offering just plain old voice service, says Jeff Gardner, Windstream CEO and president.

That should surprise nobody. There now is universal agreement that the revenue model, which is different from the value model, will over time shift from voice to broadband, wireless and other types of services and revenue sources.

"We're transforming from a residential voice model to one that's much more focused on broadband and business, and the idea there is to get to a point where we can generate some top line revenue," says Gardner.

The perhaps new wrinkle is the new focus on business customers. That might originally have seemed a rather large task, given Windstream's largely rural and smaller market footprint. By definition, business customers are a smaller percentage of total customers in any smaller market than in a bigger "metro" market.

The new wrinkle is not so much that Windstream expects to have more success with business customers in its historic footprint, but that it now is acquiring out of territory assets that are focused on business customers.

At a larger level, an argument can be made that even tier one providers increasingly find they are doing better with business customers than consumers, in large part because cable and satellite companies are taking more market share in the consumer space.

Windstream's Gardner: Enhance focus on business, wireless backhaul and broadband services