An independent telephone company since 1910, Bruce Telecom started an Internet division in 1995 and today has some 18,000 accounts, half of which use high-speed DSL.
Previously the service provider was using six Redback routers and one Copper Mountain router, which it had problems with. “Our technicians had the experience with Redback and it was time to consolidate into an edge product,” said Don Merritt, vice-president of operations with Bruce Telecom. Redback’s SmartEdge router, an integrated router that manages and delivers voice, video and Internet traffic from one location, will give the service provider “triple-play” capabilities to roll out advanced services like bandwidth-on-demand and IPTV.
Redback provides broadband services to service providers that deliver advanced services to consumers and businesses. An edge router sits on the edge of a service provider’s network and becomes the first point of contact that a consumer or business has with IP-enabled equipment. “It’s the point where the intelligence really sits,” said John Spiliotis, vice-president of sales and operations for the Americas with Redback, which was recently acquired by Ericsson for its triple-play expertise.
Increased competition
Phone companies are getting a significant amount of competition from other broadband service providers, such as cable companies, and they’re losing their local access revenues by five to six per cent per year, he said. As a result, they’re turning to advanced services such as VoIP, IPTV, business VPNs and high-speed music and video delivery.
Bruce Telecom worked with solution provider Solunet to customize the service with bandwidth-on-demand and security. Currently the service provider offers services in a range of speeds, and many of its customers subscribe to a DSL Lite service that’s not as fast as true high-speed. “We foresee in the future with video-on-demand type services, customers are going to want higher bandwidth but they’re not going to want to pay for a month’s worth of bandwidth just to download one movie,” said Wayne Eichenberger, senior technician with Bruce Telecom. With bandwidth-on-demand, customers will be able to log onto the service provider’s customer Web page and select a higher rate of service for a specific period of time.
It will also be offering attack mitigation, which can proactively prevent infected computers from adversely affecting its network or other people’s networks.
While no timetable has been put in place, he expects these services to start rolling out in the next six months.