David Schaeffer - Cogent Communications Holdings, Inc.
Management
Yeah. Sure, Mike. So, as I indicated earlier, we are in kind of a renaissance of fiber availability. And there are variety of reasons these fibers are being constructed. Some are mandated, some are speculative builds, some are being built to serve the mobile industry for small cell and backhaul, and others are being built for things such as E-Rate, B-TAP and CAP 2, (53:11) subsidized builds, which tend to be more rural. Also we have continued to broaden our base of suppliers. So that means if there's a building we want to go to, there is typically fiber in front of it that we can buy and serve that building and build a lateral and compete. So that's the good news. The bad news is, will someone come in and compete with us in our on-net footprint, and we have actually not seen that for several reasons. One, you need to enter an agreement with the landlord, and most of the competitive providers have been reluctant to enter into these long-term landlord agreements. Two, it is expensive to build into those buildings because not only do you have to build in, but because our average building is 41 storeys tall, you have to construct a infrastructure in the building. Typically that in-building infrastructure cost about $1,000 a floor, it's about a $40,000 install, that's purely speculative. And what we have seen is the other providers typically coming into the building under the utility access clauses in the customers' leases. What that means is two things. One, they don't pay the building owner, that's good for them. But two, they don't have a centralized distribution system and each floor is a home run. So it makes the installation both lengthy and expensive. And for those reasons, they become prohibitively expensive in buildings that we have pre-wired. Finally, we have seen that our pricing model and value has somewhat inoculated us from competition in that, I've talked to other competitive providers and they kind of say if we are there, they don't want to be there to compete directly with us. So we continue to sell just the downpipe. Those providers also are trying to sell a bundle of services, not just a downpipe. And therefore, they are differentiated and they are also reluctant to become that downpipe company compete with Cogent. So for all those reasons, we have not seen significant pressure in our corporate on-net footprint. Now conversely, it's been a great opportunity in the buildings that we proactively elected not to build into where we can now use those providers and that's why we sell over 900,000 off-net circuits in 5,700 buildings. If you look at the circuits per building, you are at about 1.7 circuits per building off-net, whereas in our on-net buildings where it's 17.5 circuits per building. It's apples and oranges. So I think again part of our success has been our discipline to pick the right addressable markets.