Provider Spotlight: Metro Communications Company

Roxana Ryan
Published: October 8, 2013
Related to: Southeast Central eTeam

Zachary Horn, President of Metro Communications Company, is working to expand their network throughout East Central Illinois and shared information on some of the company’s innovative updates and expansions and in the following interview.

1) Tell us about Metro Communications Company, the services you provide and the region you serve.

Metro Communications was founded in 1993 to provide Operator services and rebilled toll services for government and wholesale customers in Missouri, Iowa, Kansas and Illinois.  Purchased in 2000 by Zak Horn we migrated into a facilities based provider of TDM, SS7 and SIP wholesale services.  Today, in addition to wholesale voice, we offer a number of fiber, wave, IP, Ethernet, TDM and related services across 16 counties in East Central Illinois.  The company is privately owned and has not received State or Federal funds for construction. 

2) Are you serving any interesting anchor institutions (like schools or hospitals) or business that are using your services to do innovative things? 

In the course of building network over the past four years we found that schools, municipalities and County governments were in need of reliable, high speed services in their (often rural) locations.  Today we serve over a dozen school districts and governments mostly in the Eastern portion of our footprint but expect this number to grow over the next 2-3 years as we continue construction and pass additional towns and buildings.  While we do utilize some of the State of Illinois CMS IBOP-EC network paths, much of our new construction is in areas not touched by ARRA funded networks; in most cases we deliver school and government services back to a State CMS network POP allowing them to take advantage of the support services provided by the State at no cost.  We have also sold or leased additional conduits constructed in our duct packs to school and government organizations allowing them to operate their own, separate network for a fraction of the cost required to build it from scratch.

3) Are you doing any network upgrades or expansions? Tell us about any recent investments in infrastructure.

Beginning in 2010 we started a project to build middle mile fiber optic network across East Central Illinois to serve a number of markets including, cellular backhaul, education/government and wholesale/enterprise users with high capacity or advance requirements.  Scheduled to be completed in 2015, the network will include roughly 900 new construction miles, 350 IRU or trade miles on existing plant and serving 200+ on-net locations.  In order to keep costs down we operate 7 in house construction crews including plow, directional drilling, duct splicing and fiber splicing and support these efforts with 5-8 other contract crews.  We are focused on keeping our operational overhead down and adding value to the rural customers we pass while still providing robust services, delivered via a modern DWDM, Ethernet and TDM network constructed in multiple rings for protection.  The Central Illinois network is supported by POPs at 427 S LaSalle and 350 Cermack in Chicago, providing customers access to a number of providers for most any service.

4) What are some of your greatest obstacles in getting subscribers and/or upgrading your network?

Building the miles of network required for this project, considering our tight budget and small team, is challenging and subject to a number of outside influences including weather and road ROW regulating bodies.  We are lucky to have experienced Engineer’s from Finely Engineering and an experienced team of professionals that work hard to plan and construct assets while dealing with the needs of adjacent landowners and highway officials.  To date we have had relatively few problems and no major lost time accidents or property damage.   

5) Does your company have a website, newsletter or social media pages that we can help promote? 

We post occasional updates to our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Metrocomm - Contact and other basic information can be found at www.metrocomm.com