Bresnan Communications: A Case Study

Business Voice and Beyond: How Bresnan Communications utilized the Metaswitch Platform to enter the commercial voice business

Bresnan Communications: CATV Pioneers

One of the early pioneers of cable television, Bill Bresnan began his cable career in Minnesota in 1958. He founded Bresnan Communications in 1984 with the purchase of five Midwest cable systems. By 1997, Bresnan had upgraded the majority of its domestic systems with a hybrid fiber-coaxial architecture, offering more than 80% of its U.S. customers some of the most advanced technology and services available to suburban and rural communities in the Midwest. The company continued to upgrade most of the systems it acquired through the end of the decade.

In February 2000, Bresnan completed the sale of all of its U.S. operations to Charter Communications, now the fourth largest cable operator in the United States. In March 2003, Bresnan re-entered the cable market with the acquisition of the former TCI Rocky Mountain systems in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah.

From Residential To Business Services

Bresnan initially entered the residential voice market in 2005 via a managed voice offering that allowed it to very rapidly enter the space with a competitive, reliable service. However, they understood that the business offering they sought to deliver would require additional features and functionality not available on the residential platform as well as an even higher quality of service.

Bresnan has always reached beyond cable's traditional residential customer base, leveraging its broadband technology to provide custom high-speed data solutions to the business, education, government and healthcare communities. The company continues to do so today through its commercial division, Bresnan Business Services.

The key to any successful business offering is trust. A customer that trusts you to resolve issues quickly and professionally as they arise remains a loyal customer. Those loyal customers represent a powerful tool for acquiring new customers through word of mouth and function as an ongoing sales channel for the up-selling of new business services. Having built a successful business-class High Speed Internet offering first, Bresnan sought to expand their portfolio with voice services.

This meant selecting a switching vendor that would be as quick to respond to Bresnan's issues as Bresnan was to the issues of their own business customers. Lenny Higgins, Senior VP of Advanced Services and Don Helms, two telecom industry veterans with histories of building nation-wide voice networks, headed up Bresnan's evaluation team. They sought a vendor with a proven track record of technological innovation along with a support organization capable of ensuring that Bresnan's own customers remained loyal and happy. "We recognized that above all customers want a reliable voice platform. Metaswitch offered that reliability coupled with an advanced applications platform that could deliver new and converged features that customers were seeking."

In Metaswitch, they found a partner that enabled integration with both legacy TDM and IP converged networks for both access and transport. This allowed them the greatest deployment flexibility, leveraging the incumbent's legacy network up until the point that it made smart business sense to transition to their own network elements. What's more, it allowed Bresnan to come to market quickly with basic voice services, confident that as their own sales force ramped up on the nuances of selling business voice, they'd be able to add a wide range of complementary services.