LAS VEGAS----With Cable Voice over IP VoIP showing dramatic growth, especially in
the lucrative business services market, MetaSwitch and Big River
Telephone Company have joined to enable a significant source of new
revenue for cable system operators.
Using Big River’s MetaSwitch-powered wholesale
VoIP service, regional cable systems operators can simultaneously
achieve several ambitious goals:
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Launch feature-rich services to business subscribers
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Add significant new sources of residential revenue
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Create a package of services that will greatly enhance customer
loyalty.
Seven cable providers have already adopted the combined Big
River/MetaSwitch VoIP solution, including Eagle Communications, NewWave
Communications and Vista III Media. Big River anticipates signing up
additional cable partners throughout the United States based on the
success of these initial deployments.
Based in Sikeston, MO, NewWave Communications provides cable television,
high speed Internet and digital telephone service to customers in
Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina
and Tennessee. NewWave has seen tremendous success partnering with Big
River to launch MetaSwitch-powered digital telephone service.
“Big River has been fantastic to work with.
They took care of the entire process of adding voice to our service
bundle, and are clearly very experienced in managing all telecom-related
issues,” said Jim Gleason, NewWave
Communications’ chief executive officer. “We
now offer our residential and business customers advanced features that
go above and beyond the standard telephone features provided by the
incumbent telephone companies.”
Gleason added that the addition of voice, completing the triple play
bundle of cable offerings, has lifted the take rate of other services
while reducing customer churn. “It’s
been a great addition to our product line up and has brought with it
some great cash flow,” said Gleason.
According to the VoIP Services report issued by leading market
research firm Infonetics, North American VoIP service revenue will grow
from $2.6 billion last year to $13.3 billion in 2009, with the market
fairly equally split between business and residential segments.
According to the report, the primary driver for businesses around the
world to migrate to IP is increased functionality, greater flexibility,
improved productivity, and the potential of growing revenue through
better customer service.
“We have found tremendous enthusiasm among
the MSO community for the combination of MetaSwitch’s
feature-rich platform and Big River’s
extensive experience deploying VoIP in our own network,”
said Jerry Howe, Big River’s chief executive
officer. “Voice over cable now accounts for
about a third of our business but will soon eclipse our embedded base of
customers because of the fast adoption of cable telephone service.”
“Many MSOs are focused on maintaining all of
the components of their cable systems and don’t
necessarily want to invest in a VoIP switching system or the requisite
staffing required to manage it. The reality is that voice is a bit of a
tricky beast. If they buy voice services at wholesale and sell at
retail, they can focus on what they know best and maximize their profits,”
he said.
Big River’s product offerings include: IP
Centrex, hosted PBX, T1 services over IP, unified messaging, voicemail,
simultaneous ring, teleconferencing, and find-me-follow-me services,
complemented by ‘sticky’
Web-based interfaces. The company is using the MetaSwitch distributed
architecture to enable Big River’s new
products, with one softswitch located in St. Louis and another at the
company’s Cape Girardeau, Mo. headquarters.
Media gateways can be located anywhere in the country to provide local
PSTN interfaces and an efficient network architecture.
About MetaSwitch
MetaSwitch is an industry-leading vendor of switching and applications
solutions for both packet and circuit-switched networks. Its widely
deployed call agent, media/signaling gateway and application server
platform supports a full range of Class 4/5 capabilities and hosted
unified communications services. Based on open standards including IP
Multimedia Subsystem IMS, MetaSwitch solutions scale from a few
hundred to millions of subscribers in both integrated and distributed
configurations. Customers include incumbent and competitive local
exchange carriers, as well as operators of broadband wireless, cable and
fiber networks. MetaSwitch is a division of Data Connection, a
consistently profitable and privately held telecom technology provider.
For more information: www.metaswitch.com
About Big River Telephone
Big River Telephone, with over twenty years of experience, is one of the
oldest competitive telephone company providers in the country, as well
as the largest in the Southeast Missouri region. Big River Telephone
brings network service solutions to its customers and has the
capabilities to meet businesses needs throughout the United States. The
company focuses on superior, personalized customer service and is the
recipient of the 2005 Gartner award for excellence in CRM
implementation. More information is available at http://www.bigrivertelephone.com.
Data Connection and MetaSwitch are trademarks of Data Connection Limited
and Data Connection Corporation. Brands and products referenced herein
are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.
Copyright © 2007 Data Connection Limited
