The triple play is the Holy Grail for service providers, and rural telcos are certainly no exception in this quest. But some rural telcos have held off on taking the plunge because of their unique challenges. However, several vendors are now offering solutions tailor-made for the special needs of these carriers.
“We’re seeing a lot of activity around the desire of rural ILECs to move toward ADSL2+ and IP-based softswitches, says John Konczal, vice president of product management for OSS provider Telution. “But we’re not seeing a lot of deployments yet.”
One reason for that, he says, is because of the capital expenditures required to make these things realities. Another reason, he adds, is the regulatory environment. “These rurals’ capital structure is nowhere near that of the RBOCs,” Konczal says.
“And they have the same type of regulatory restrictions as the RBOCs, so it’s making it a little difficult to go head first into investment.”
To help rural telcos tackle those challenges, a number of equipment manufacturers are catering to these carriers with solutions geared especially for their needs.
One such company doing that is Pannaway Technologies Inc. Pannaway’s newest offering is the 10gbps Broadband Aggregation Router, which enables toll-quality voice, broadcastquality video and high-speed Internet access.
“There are a couple areas where we differentiate ourselves,” says Kevin Brown, Pannaway’s vice president of marketing. “The physical size of our products is very compact, and we can offer gigE up to 80 kilometers.” But the major selling point, he says, is that Pannaway’s solutions offer true lifeline capability. “We’re seeing major blockers with VoIP,” Brown says. “For example, when the power goes out with AT&T’s CallVantage solution, you can’t pick up the phone and get a dial tone. Our solution gives that, and we have a patent pending on the technology.”
Pannaway achieves that not with batteries but by simply sending power down the line, Brown says. The end user will not have full service until the line is again fully powered, but will have that dial tone for lifeline service, he adds. “This feature has made a huge impact with our customer base, giving them a full ability and confidence to move to VoIP.”
Another equipment manufacturer that is looking to make the path to the triple play as smooth as possible is Ciena Corp. The vendor’s tack has been to set up its CN 1000 solutions, which provide integrated voice, data and video services over copper distribution networks while supporting the evolution to services over fiber terminations as a risk-free option, says Gary Bolton, vice president of product marketing for Ciena. That way, rural carriers won’t have to worry about huge expenditures with no guarantee of return, he explains.
“Customers can deploy at POTS economics. Capex is based on POTS pricing. The customer can deploy it for POTS and then when they decide to deploy DSL, they can turn it up and pay Ciena only when those subscribers actually subscribe,” he says. That way, the customer has a match between revenue and expense.
“With our competitors, the customers have a huge capex to build out DSLAMs when they’re only betting on potential subscribers. Our solution mitigates the risk.”
Bolton says the CN 1000’s key differentiator is that every call can be a VoIP call. “It allows subscribers to use the same telephones they’ve always used. The CN 1000 packetizes that call and delivers it to either a TDM switch or a softswitch, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds,” he says. Moreover, the carrier can decide to which switch the call goes on a lineby- line basis.
In that way, the carrier can give the subscriber the highest level of service possible. And moving the customers to higher level services is paramount. The technology is there, the equipment works, so the next step is getting the subscribers to take the services, says Geoff Burke, video solutions marketing director for Calix. “We’re seeing customers taking a very close look at optimizing what they can get out of deployments. So I think we are seeing a fair amount of more sophisticated marketing coming out of rural carriers,” he says. “They’ve never really seen themselves as proactive marketers, but now they have to get into that line of thinking.”
However, Telution’s Konczal warns rural telcos to make sure they have the staff necessary to sell the new offerings. “It’s one thing to sell telephone service, but now they will have to explain video packages, and that’s a whole different sales environment, and rural carriers do need to address this.”
