VoIP is billed as telephony solution for small cablecos at CCSA convention

Technologies have evolved sufficiently for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to represent a cost effective way for small- and medium-sized cablecos to offer telephony services to their customers, members of the Canadian Cable Systems Alliance (CCSA) were told last week. At the CCSA annual meeting in Toronto, Peter Makowchik of BIAC Broadband revealed his company’s plans to supply small cablecos with the infrastructure necessary to deliver telephony services using their high-speed Internet networks. VoIP would allow smaller cablecos to introduce telephony without the expensive circuit switching used in larger markets. "The technology is pretty good today to offer VoIP solutions. We’ve done the business case, and we feel it’s cost effective," Makowchik told Canadian Communications Reports. "We can offer a service that can deal with as low as 500 cable subscribers. Voice over Internet Protocol is dependent on the broadband structure. You need to have dedicated backbone and connections between servers and between your gateways and your point of presence, and we’re going to make sure that those connections are in place to provide a much better quality of service than if you were just going through the public Internet system and trying to establish a VoIP connection." BIAC Broadband plans to wholesale VoIP solutions to cable operators so they can offer phone and accompanying multimedia services to their high-speed Internet subscribers. While BIAC will build the backbone technology, cablecos will be responsible for customer installation and terminal equipment as well as customer management under the company’s model. Makowchik said that BIAC has several cablecos, which he wouldn’t name, signed on to test the service with commercial rollout expected before next March. Central servers will be set up in large cities such as Toronto or Vancouver with other boxes deployed in conjunction with the server or attached to class 5 switches across the country. A nationwide rollout of the system will depend upon which cablecos the company is able to sign up as customers. "We’ll start doing trials later in this quarter. We’re in process of trying to get all the equipment that we need," he said. "We have a solution that will come in stages. We’d like to do the deployment in a regional fashion. But if we have to be scattered (because not all cablecos in one region opt for BIAC’s solution), we’ll do that as well. Our approach is that it’ll be a (small- and mid-sized cableco) industry initiative for telephony play." Makowchik said BIAC is targeting smaller cablecos across the country because "the bigger cable operators have their own strategy in what they plan on doing." Although the backbone will be shared, he said that individual small- and mid-sized cablecos can offer different feature sets to their customers. BIAC has signed on Nortel Networks and General Bandwidth as partners in deploying the service to cable operators. Makowchik said BIAC plans to offer a carrier grade class of service, so a cableco can offer a primary telephone line to compete one-on-one with locals, or it can offer a secondary line service with a lot of multimedia features. "Voice over Internet doesn’t need the cable operator, but if you don’t do it, someone else will," he said during his CCSA presentation. "Cablecos can’t afford to wait and sit." Being able to offer a triple play of services - cable television, Internet and telephony - will reduce customer churn, he added. One survey, he noted, showed that customer churn is reduced by 20% for customers who subscribe to two products and down 53% for those who sign on for three. Lee Bragg, the co-CEO of Eastlink Cable Systems, the only cableco in Canada currently offering triple play bundling, confirms that offering the three services reduces customer churn (CCR, Aug. 15/02). Whistler Cable in British Columbia is one Canadian cableco that has already tested VoIP. Whistler Cable is hoping to offer customers a secondary phone line with free long-distance to nearby Vancouver. Whistler Cable president Ron Saperstein expects to be able to provide the service to customers for around $39.95 a month, a 50% markup from the $26.58 he estimates it will cost to service each customer. Saperstein expects to enlist a third-party vendor, at least to start, to provide the backbone. He said he will look at the BIAC option but he won’t make a final decision on who he will partner with until later this month or next. Another possible supplier is Galaxy Telecom. He is targeting a commercial launch in February 2004.

VoIP is billed as telephony solution for small cablecos at CCSA convention

Broadcast | October 3, 2003

Unlock all the Canadian telecom, broadcasting and digital media news you need.

FREE TRIAL

SUBSCRIBE

Inside The Wire Report

Information

Hill Times Publishing

Get in Touch With Us