The hype surrounding telco video rollouts may make Wall Street investors happy, but it’s not warming the hearts of business customers, according to Mike Rouleau, senior vice president of business development and strategy for Time Warner Telecom.

“Medium to large businesses are suffering,” he said. “They are frustrated because they are not getting the attention they need from the big incumbents.”

Those incumbents – mostly AT&T and Verizon – are investing heavily in building fiber into their local loops to offer consumer video services to compete with cable providers. They are also focusing on the large multi-national corporations, Rouleau claims. In between those two markets lies what he calls “the unfortunate 5000” – medium to large businesses, the very market TWT is addressing.

“The customers don’t get the same level of service and support that the big businesses do, but they have the same needs as big businesses,” he said.

The competitive carrier is stressing its local market presence in the 75 markets it serves as an advantage when competing against larger incumbents, and stresses its national footprint, especially for Ethernet services, when competing against other CLECs.

“We have a customer in Fresno who told us they can’t get a local technician – they have to call San Antonio and have the call routed around and sent back to El Paso before they get a response,” Rouleau said. “Yet they know our local operations director by name.”

TWT is also priding itself on the ability to match the right electronics with the customer’s need and do customized deployments such as dual building entrances for survivability. Most of TWT’s service is provided over fiber optics into a building, but last fall, the company added copper extensions using technology from Overture and Telco Systems. The latter provides an integrated access device that combines voice with the data over an Ethernet connection. TWT can offer up to 3 T-1s of capacity, or about 4.5 Megabits per second, to smaller locations, and this is a growing part of its Ethernet business, Rouleau said.