Richard D Battle

"It is critical for fiber optic networks to become simpler and more accessible if they are to be widely accepted and used -- and 95 percent of all packetized traffic begins and ends over Ethernet," said Rick Battle, Director of Product Development for AboveNet.

"We had a bunch of customers come to us and say, ‘We like the idea of [the earlier services], but we only have 20 Mb/s of requirement, not 50 or 100, and we don't want to pay for what we're never going to use,'" said Rick Battle, AboveNet's marketing director.

"It sounds reasonably attractive, but it becomes a financial accounting exercise" to determine whether to bid for a particular city, says Rick Battle, director of marketing for AboveNet Inc., a White Plain, N.Y.-based provider of high-speed telecommunications services, which he says is active but "not huge" in Chicago.