Seeking to deploy a consumer VoIP offering without a large deployment of infrastructure to link to the PSTN, Adelphia Communications Corp. has made an agreement for Level 3 Communications Inc. to be its exclusive provider of wholesale VoIP services for residential voice.
Adelphia, which has 5.2 million cable customers and 1.4 million high-speed Internet access customers in 31 states and Puerto Rico. expects to launch the service in 2005, though the exact date and service offerings have not been finalized. Adelphia has recently seen a surge of interest in its high-speed service, says a source at the cable company,
Level 3's (3)VoIP Enhanced Local service was a logical choice, “If you think about all the regulation and the equipment costs and all interconnects with ILECs at every CO to terminate a call,” says Tom Buttermore, vice president of data and voice engineering and operations at Adelphia. “If I could do IP handoffs to Level 3 and take advantage of their existing capabilities, why not?” He adds, “We’re not a CLEC, so we rely on Level 3 for phone numbers.”
The Adelphia service aims to be a replacement for the existing PSTN, and the cable network has designed it to replace all the phones in a customer’s house. “We wanted to make sure that, from a reliability perspective and feature perspective, it was virtually identical, though the underlying implementation is quite different from a circuit-switched network.”
With Level 3 taking care of interconnection to the PSTN, “I can concentrate on VoIP skill sets rather than legacy skill sets, and it’s far more economically viable for me,” says Buttermore.
Combining SIP and PacketCable
The Adelphia VoIP will be a PacketCable-compliant service that uses an ‘embedded’ MTA, one that combines a cable modem and PacketCable VoIP with two RJ-11, or standard, phone jacks plus an RJ-45 jack. “We do not use SIP for signaling,” Buttermore says. “Our service is aimed at consumers ... and is a replacement so, for everything that you as a consumer have, it is the same thing.” He adds, “SIP is a very powerful protocol and we will use it in other ways.”
Adelphia’s handoffs to Level 3 will be SIP. “When we communicate with Level 3, we do SIP to do the call setup, so I would call it a hybrid approach,” says Buttermore. “We use their end-office call termination, because they already have colocations and trunks there. So it is a very cost-efficient way for us to get into the business and have very good quality of service.”
To meet the expectation of availability consumers have for the phone network, Adelphia will install four-hour battery backup in the network and in the new embedded MTA device. “This is a powered network, fully E-911 compliant that will integrate with PSAPs and is ‘inside compliant,’ which is a standard for addressing that PSAPs use,” Buttermore says. That method gives PSAPs exact addressing of the location of a call.
Thinking about the Future
Buttermore says the company recognizes that the use of PacketCable means the service cannot provide some of the benefits of SIP, such as the ability to move to another location and use the phone, or even use it locally over Wi-Fi. But it already is considering how it might extend it service outside the home.
One future scenario for cable operators is a combination of Wi-Fi and mobile, with cable helping extend mobile coverage. “Cable is interestingly positioned because of where our network is, in residential areas. The potential of expanding that coverage is enormous,” Buttermore says. For cable, such moves are “getting close to financial justification as an industry,” he says.
Adelphia also is anticipating a future where the voice traffic begins to migrate off the PSTN in large volumes and Adelphia is doing IP-to-IP hand-offs with other cable companies using the quality-of-service features of PacketCable. “Cox will hand me a call, and I will guarantee quality of service and use same mechanism to transit that voice with quality of service end to end,” Buttermore says.
