Putting Services on the Softswitch

There's plenty of innovation in today's announcement from Metaswitch: in-building BPL, triple play for college students, symmetric bandwidth, and fiber backhaul. But we think that the business case is in the services, not the hardware.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [November 28, 2006]

London-based Metaswitch is announcing today that First Communications, a CLEC based in Akron, Ohio, has deployed its product in place of several large-scale Nortel DMS500 switches.

First Communications is a rapidly growing CLEC that will make ISP-Planet's list of the top ISPs in the U.S., having acquired part of CoreComm and all of Acction Communications last year.

First Communications' minority owner is First Energy, a utility serving areas in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

BPL in the house
In its latest deployment, First Communications is using in-building broadband over powerline (BPL) technology to serve a multiple tenant unit (MTU) building—a dormitory at Columbia College Chicago.

"The building has eight floors, in downtown Chicago," explains First Communications CEO Ray Hexamer. "The dorms are housed in a building that was a printing press. It's an old building that would be expensive to cable, so we're using BPL to deliver data to the students. The students are given a small modem when they arrive at the college. We provide them with internet phone, data, and television."

So the company is using IPTV? "We've got the pipe to deliver IPTV, but we're waiting for the technology to mature and for the cost to become competitive. For this deployment, we're using DirecTV. We could have used IPTV, but there was no local content available at the time we deployed, and the college wanted its students to have local content."

Hexamer says each student has plenty of bandwidth (the company uses Qwest fiber for backhaul). "Each student gets about the equivalent of a T-1, symmetrical. Now that word's got around the campus about the bandwidth these students have (they had to go to a common area last year to share a connection), there's broadband envy and we're looking at deploying in other campus buildings."

Residential services
Metaswitch is bullish on residential services, a broad category that includes college dorms and luxury homes. Andy Randall, Metaswitch vice president of marketing, says he expects demand from developers to increase. Of course, the company sells to service providers who work with developers, rather than to the developers themselves.

"As the housing market tightens, developers will look for more ways to attract buyers," Randall says. "Current building trends suggest that builders want to work with service providers who can offer the services that can differentiate their offering."

He says that business features are coming to high end residences. Some luxury homes now have multi line phones, call monitoring, and integration with unified messaging or cell phone services.

Just last month, Metaswitch announced that several regional CLECs, including Norlight, a company familiar to readers of ISP-Planet, have adopted Metaswitch's Cisco-friendly Secure IP Migration Platform for the Local Exchange (SIMPLE) solution.

Today's news, Randall says, is another case where customers want all the features of an advanced solution without paying telco core prices. "In addition to the purchase price, the ongoing maintenance of these switches can be quite expensive. Nortel licenses each feature on the switch. Power and air conditioning are not trivial costs."

He says that Metaswitch enables CLECs to offer a full suite of services. First Communications' Hexamer confirms this. He says the college has already connected its security cameras to the BPL infrastructure in its dorm.

— End