Big River: A Case Study

Big River Telephone cut across over 1,000 trunks to the Metaswitch VP3500 Series Softswitch in just 20 days

In the field of competitive telecommunications, few providers can boast a successful track record of more than a few years. Big River Telephone, however, has been providing industry leading services to its local community, and beyond, for over 20 years.

Now one of the largest providers serving the Missouri/Illinois/Kentucky region, and growing rapidly, Big River's CEO Jerry Howe attributes the company's success to its focus on its customers' business needs, together with the deep industry experience the company's management team has built up over the years.

"While we work in the community on a local level, we also pride ourselves on our ability to deploy leading edge technology to meet the growing and evolving needs of our customers," says Howe. "It was with this in mind that we turned to Metaswitch."

Metaswitch offered Big River the opportunity to streamline its existing operations and to expand with innovative services including Voice over IP (VoIP) - all from a single platform, the VP3500 Series Class 5 Softswitch. The result has been significant cost savings from a more efficient network, combined with rapid subscriber growth as Big River reached out to new markets.

"Support for legacy protocols - particularly SS7 and PRI - was key for interoperability with our existing Class 4 and RAS servers," explains Kevin Keaveny, Big River's Vice President of Engineering and Operations. "More important, however, was Metaswitch's next generation capabilities, in particular support for VoIP, migration to a distributed softswitch architecture, and an open services interface that we are already making use of with our in-house developed IP voicemail and conferencing system. Bottom line, this is a platform that saves us money, while allowing us to provide a range of innovative new services for our customers."

Realizing the immediate business case benefits, Big River approached Metaswitch anxious to get started as soon as possible. Metaswitch delivered, deploying the switch and cutting over more than 1,000 trunks in just 20 days. The new softswitch was soon carrying over 30 million minutes per month.

Keaveny puts the success of this "heart transplant operation" down to Metaswitch's exceptional support engineers: "It is great to call the Metaswitch support team and find a wealth of knowledge and understanding not only of what their product does, but of the environment in which it operates, whether it is SS7 signaling, call record processing, or the myriad other interfaces in which a telephone switch operates. While many vendors have great technical staff, very few have the positive, helpful attitude and dedication to supporting the customer found across the Metaswitch support team. This, in itself, puts Metaswitch head and shoulders above their competition."

If, like Big River Telephone, you want to get the most out of your existing network while taking a first step towards next generation technology, then contact us today to find out more.

To learn more about Big River Telephone, visit www.bigrivertelephone.com.