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Backoffice & OSS
Moving Cable to VoIP
MetaSwitch Platform Enables Small Operators to Deliver Converged Services
by Jim Barthold
MetaSwitch has introduced a new softswitch platform that it
says will help smaller cable operators start delivering IP voice
services to both business and residential customers. Called
COMPETE – Cable Operator Multiservice Platform for Enhanced
Telephony Evolution – the service is based on MetaSwitch’s
IMS softswitch platform and is deployed by more than 10
cable operators already.
“MetaSwitch has sold primarily to tier 2/3 CLECs and IOCs.
This is a nice evolution of our company strategy to move into
this new market,” said Matt Byrd, director of product
marketing at MetaSwitch.
It’s not only a new market, it’s a market filled with smaller
operators since most of the major cable operators have
already adopted at least residential voice service. One
MetaSwitch COMPETE user, Vidia Communications in
Oklahoma City, has only about 700 total customers, about
200 of whom also get voice services. On the other hand,
thanks to funding from the Rural Utilities Services (RUS), the
company has an advanced Fiber-to-the-Curb (FTTC) network
and a hankering to add voice to its cable service as it builds
out a plant that passes 4,000 premises.
“MetaSwitch has enabled us to provide bundled voice-over-
IP – we call it digital voice – along with our cable TV service
and high-speed data service,” said Sam Curtis, a senior
engineer at Vidia. “We’re a small company. I don’t know how
glamorous we sound.”
They’re glamorous enough to MetaSwitch to encourage the
company to enhance its product offering to include both
residential and commercial service over a cable hybrid
fiber/coax plant.
“This opportunity in a lot of ways is not a lot different than
the UNE-P CLECs that in the last 12 to 18 months have had to
move away from reselling incumbent lines to actually owning
and operating their own IP networks,” said Byrd, pointing out
that MetaSwitch already has about 300 of those types of
deployments.
The new opportunity meets a customer demand that the
company is getting to feed business customers by leveraging
IP-based technology and softswitching to offer enhanced
applications “whether it be hosted PBX or unified messaging,
etc., all of the service that we can deliver over our package.”
Byrd pointed MetaSwitch’s ability to deliver business services
via a hosted PBX.
“We have a lot of hosted PBX capabilities that we can deliver
right out of the softswitch,” he said. “A lot of that is a hosted
solution right on our switch; it’s not even a separate third
party application server that requires a lot of integration or
anything like that.”
The COMPETE system, he said, is “more for cable operators
to move from wherever they are today – typically some kind
of PacketCable specification – to full IMS PacketCable 2.0.
We’ve made a conscious decision to attack this market now.”
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