General

Triple Play in Wyoming

A WISP in Wyoming proves that triple play services are nothing new to small, innovative, nimble ISPs.

by Gerry Blackwell [June 24, 2005]

The notion of the triple play—offering high-speed Internet, telephone and TV services over the same broadband network—is suddenly hot, but the idea is not in fact all that new. Nor is IP technology necessarily the key to offering a triple play. TCT West Inc., a small independent phone company-turned-ISP in rural Wyoming, is a good case in point.

With a total customer base of less than 7,000 spread over an area of 400 square miles, TCT has offered ISP services since 1997 and a triple play—traditional telephony, high-speed Internet, and digital television—since 2000. It proves that big, deep-pocketed companies in urban markets don't have a monopoly on leading-edge services and business models. In fact, TCT is one of an estimated 50 to 75 independent telcos offering video services today.

"Our management staff and board of directors recognized early on that a phone company is really in the business of selling bandwidth," says TCT's Rod Collingwood, plant operations and video manager. "Given the simple realization that a phone company is just a bandwidth broker, we said why not take the next logical step of putting in high enough bandwidth to provide [additional] services? Then if you have enough bandwidth, it makes sense that the next step is to offer video."

Note that the TV service is not IP. It's delivered over an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network. However, the company did recently convert its headend so it could deliver both ATM-based video and IPTV and it is currently beta testing IPTV. "Eventually the whole world will be IP," Collingwood concedes.

Growing beyond the borders
And not just for video. TCT is already offering VoIP services in areas where it's not the phone company. In those areas, it delivers services over Motorola Canopy-based wireless broadband networks. More surprisingly, perhaps, it will begin offering VoIP services to traditional telephone customers in its own exchange areas within a few months. Why cannibalize the traditional telephony business?

"We realize we have to quit thinking like a traditional telephone company," Collingwood says. "This is just one more service to offer. If there's a market for a service we want to offer it. The theory is, if customers are going to switch to VoIP anyway, they might as well switch to one of our products rather than to another provider."

Many phone companies are now contemplating triple play offerings as a way to defend against competition from cable companies offering VoIP in addition to their high-speed Internet and traditional television services. But the competitive situation is reversed in TCT West country, Collingwood says. TCT was first with a triple play. Now the incumbent cable company, Bresnan Communications, is beginning to offer VoIP in order to compete with TCT.

"We're glad we got into this early enough that we're not stumbling now," he says. "We already got our black eyes."

Although TCT won't talk about how much it has invested to support its triple play, it is clearly substantial—and the investment continues.

It starts with a Motorola NextLevel video system that includes satellite downlink, video headend, ATM switch and aggregated multicasting servers. TCT recently upgraded the system so it could offer true video on demand (VOD) services rather than just pay-per-view. The iView middleware from Tut Systems allows TCT to offer onscreen program guides with picture in picture (PIP) and onscreen caller ID services integrated even with its traditional telephony service.

A quality network
The network to date includes over 500 miles of fiber. This may not sound like much when compared to the fiber deployed by big national and regional network operators, but for a company this size in this small an area, it's significant. In areas where TCT operates the telephone exchange, even fairly remote and sparsely populated areas, it runs fiber to the neighborhood or fiber to the curb. From the DLC (Digital Loop Carrier) cabinet in each neighborhood, it goes the rest of the way to subscribers' premises over existing copper.

"[The network] is entirely fiber fed," Collingwood stresses. "We don't use any copper [backbone] carrier. We have some fiber-fed DLCs with fewer than a dozen customers."

For the last 100 meters over copper, TCT uses a mix of VDSL (Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line), ADSL S=1/2 (full rate ADSL that supports downstream data rates up to 10.5Mbps) and, most recently, ADSL2. In all areas, it offers 1 to 1.5 Mbps high-speed connectivity, bursting to 3 Mbps—and that is dedicated bandwidth, Collingwood notes—plus either three or two standard definition video streams: three in VDSL areas, two in ADSL.

If this sounds like better service than many urban dwellers are receiving, it's because it is. "A lot of our suppliers when they come out here tell us they wish they had [this level of service] at their offices," Collingwood says.

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