Blackfoot Telephone: A Case Study

Metaswitch and Occam together enabled Blackfoot to migrate to an all-IP services network

Founded as a co-operative in 1954, Blackfoot Telephone is one of the largest telephone companies in the Mid-West with 23 exchanges serving over 17,000 lines across 6,500 square miles of southwestern Montana. Headquartered in Missoula, Blackfoot offers a full array of personal and business communications options that include local telephone service, high-speed Internet service, communications systems, long distance, and wireless digital PCS.

Blackfoot has a history of being at the cutting edge of technology. In 1995, it was the first telephone company in Montana to provide local Internet service to its customers, and has continued to invest extensively in its network, with DSL available to 96% of its customers today.

As early as 2001, Dave Martin, Blackfoot’s director of technology, realized that Internet technologies threatened to bring about changes to the industry that would turn the company’s entire business model upside-down. Blackfoot embarked on a strategy to move the company to a packet-based infrastructure, laying hundreds of miles of fiber cable and adopting a softswitch-controlled service delivery platform. The rationale – reduce costs and position Blackfoot Telephone for out-of-region expansion.

To implement this strategy, Martin led an exhaustive evaluation of all the leading access and softswitch vendors, eventually settling on the combination of Occam Networks’ Broadband Loop Carrier system and Metaswitch’s Class 5 Softswitch. In addition, Blackfoot selected Metaswitch’s UC9000 Unified Communications System to deliver enhanced messaging services to its subscribers.

“We selected Metaswitch and Occam on the basis of their product maturity and quality of support,” explains Martin. “We recognized the strategic value of VoIP, and they really were the only vendors out there with that capability proven and deployed together in the field. Even so, we were quite amazed at the speed with which we were able to get everything up and running. This is definitely the right network architecture for our future.”

If, like Blackfoot Telephone, you want to move to a next generation network – safely – then contact us today to find out more. To learn more about Blackfoot Telephone visit www.blackfoot.com.