Quotron benefits from competitive local access service

Communications News, Dec, 1991 by Martin Vos

When the long distance (LD) market was opened to competition, LD providers quickly began to offer superior network technology and service at lower prices in order to compete.

Quotron Systems, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Citicorp, and nearly all companies--especially information-intensive companies--benefited from this competitive LD marketplace.

Quotron, headquartered in Los Angeles, is one of the world's largest suppliers of equity data to the financial community.

The company's international network, operating at more than 6,000 financial institutions and exchanges in 23 countries, delivers real-time prices for more than 120,000 investment instruments and allows broker and trader customers to follow the equity markets and Dow Jones News and Reuters New services via terminals at the customer location.

Search for local access

When the LD market was truly opened to equal competition in 1984, introducing what were then known as bypass companies (MCI, Sprint), we began to diversify our LD service to take advantage of reduced costs provided by the competitive market.

Although the local access market still is not completely open to competition, we knew there were some competitive local access providers that could offer us similar cost advantages to those we were enjoying from our carriers.

Additionally, LD competition enabled us to upgrade our LD network from copper to digital fiber-optic technology. However, many of the traditional local access carriers still rely on copper cabling.

We wanted to select a local access provider who could ubiquitously provide us with an all-fiber, digital local service, allowing us to move forward with the latest technology.

Digital fiber-optic transmission is important for companies like Quotron that transmit vast quantities of data over phones lines.

Unlike copper, which requires purchasing and laying additional cabling to carry more capacity, fiber optics have an enormous bandwidth, providing virtually unlimited capacity.

After reviewing the available competitive local access services, we selected Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS), Inc. In addition to being more cost-effective than the BOCs (Bell Operating Companies), MFS is the only provider with fully digital fiber-optic local access networks operational in most major cities.

A nationwide local access provider was important in our selection process because of the unique four-level architecture of Quotronl's global, point-to-point network.

In order to use our far-reaching network effectively, we needed a provider who offered service in the various cities in which our clients are located.

Initially, we tested our competitive local access provider's service in Chicago during 1989. Since then, we have expanded service from those pilot circuits to more than 500 data circuits throughout the nation--including Boston, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and San Francisco.

Now, our use of competitive local access is only limited to the extent to which our carrier has access to our customers' office buildings.