MetaSwitch eNews - December 2006

Welcome to the second edition of MetaSwitch eNews! With the year-end upon us, I imagine that most of you are in a state of chaos with last minute gift buying, visiting family and friends for the holidays, and wrapping up your year-end to-do list at the office. Prior to heading out the door for the holidays, I hope that you will browse through our latest edition of MetaSwitch eNews.

This second edition of our online newsletter features a competitive carrier revenue review from our colleagues at NPRG, provides a closer look at partner equipment testing, and reflects on what the leading cable companies are doing with voice services. Please also take a look at our new podcast, glance at how Cisco and MetaSwitch have partnered to deliver you the best in NGN technology, and read our latest case study featuring TCT.

My hope is that the articles in this newsletter will offer you answers and insight into MetaSwitch technology and business practices. More importantly, I want to stimulate questions from our readers, catalyzing an ongoing dialogue. Thank you to everybody who has already provided positive feedback on our first edition - I encourage you to send more.

Competitive Carrier Revenue Review

Terrence L. Barnich
President & CEO, NPRG

As we engage in our annual research and analysis of the competitive telecom sector and its metrics for NPRG's Competitive Carrier Report, we keep a keen eye fixed for clues to trends that may define larger industry movement. Our recent revenue review has yielded, we think, a few important directional insights. Overall sector revenue growth lately has remained relatively flat; our last Competitive Carrier Report, Vol. 20 (2005), showed 2004-2005 total revenues dead-even. And our revenue forecast last year was that it would, in fact, decline slightly. See Table 1, which illustrates total industry revenue growth over the 2003-2006 (est.) period.

Preliminary actual data available for 2006, however, seem to show some resumption of growth - a happy occurrence, despite our earlier professional (slight) miscalculation. However, at a very slow (single digit) rate.

So, we have decided to throw back the covers a bit to see whether there's something going on we could detect under the overall "low growth" label.

TCT: A Case Study

How a Rural Telco Transformed Itself into a Competitive IP Communications Company

TCT, formerly known as Tri-County Telephone, is not your typical rural telephone company. When we first met with TCT almost four years ago, they had already realized, long before it became apparent to most independent operators, that they had to prepare for the advent of voice over IP and increasing competition.

Since then, they have taken the steps required to reconfigure their entire organization from an incumbent telephone company mindset to an entrepreneurial environment that embraces change and new technologies.

The decommissioning of their Lucent 5ESS was just one symbolic milestone in their evolution to a total communications provider delivering many different forms of communications and entertainment services.

Top MSO Deploys MetaSwitch

Cisco and MetaSwitch Partner

BroadStar Communications and Norlight Telecommunications are among more than 20 competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) that have adopted MetaSwitch's Secure IP Migration Platform for the Local Exchange (SIMPLE) solution, which integrates IP Next-Generation Networking (IP NGN) technologies from Cisco Systems®.

BroadStar, a leading provider of telephone, cable television and broadband Internet services in the southeastern United States, worked closely with MetaSwitch and Cisco to architect a scalable triple-play solution for luxury residential properties, including condominiums.

Norlight's CTO, Michael Ulicki, said: "MetaSwitch is widely recognized as a technology leader, which was important to Norlight as we looked to the future. More importantly, several months into service deployment, we can attest to the fact that the company really stepped up to the plate to ensure a successful implementation."

MetaSwitch Engineering Conference

By Joel Guy, Proposal Manager

MetaSwitch held its annual Engineering Conference at the historic Claremont Resort and Spa in Berkeley, CA, on October 16-18, 2006. Attendees included consulting engineers from New Hampshire to Oregon and many states in between.

This invitation-only event gave consulting engineers the opportunity to meet directly with representatives from MetaSwitch's headquarters team to learn more about the latest MetaSwitch technology and services. MetaSwitch presenters included senior architects from the engineering team and executives from product management, customer support, sales and marketing.

The conference included a variety of technical sessions, new application scenarios, as well as partner and interoperability updates. The 3-day event was not all work, however, as there was time for a round of golf or a tour of Muir Woods, plus an evening out in San Francisco.

New Podcast

We have been busy adding to our "Zen and the Art of Network Transformation" podcast series. Please take a few minutes to download and listen to the latest edition, whether from your PC or on your iPod.

The New CLEC

What will it take for service providers to thrive in the coming decade? What business strategies are they adopting and do new technologies offer opportunities to compete - or destroy their ability to differentiate? And what regulatory changes are imminent that will change the ground rules - yet again? These questions, and others, were the topic at a breakfast panel sponsored by MetaSwitch at CompTel Fall in Orlando, Florida. MetaSwitch CEO John Lazar, Cisco's Bill McCarthy, and Remi Communications' David Malfara's discussion was moderated by Rich Williams of Connect2 Communications. PodTech.net brings you excerpts from the panel.

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Laboratory Testing Types

By Doug Kreitz
Solutions Director

Before solutions reach our customers, four levels of testing take place to ensure smooth product performance. Each step of the process is important in assuring that customer equipment works properly.

The MetaSwitch Interoperability Test Group (ITG) is directly involved in several types of testing. The primary type of testing conducted by the ITG is to test interoperability between the MetaSwitch and other vendor products. For partner products that use the voice interface of the MetaSwitch, we test signaling and call flows from the MetaSwitch to ensure that these systems behave as intended. An example could be as simple as when the subscriber on phone "A" calls someone on phone "B". We want to assure that subscriber "A" hears ringing until phone "B" picks up. Alternatively, testing the products that use the management interface of the MetaSwitch means ensuring that the resultant state matches the intended change in the user interface of the partner product. For instance, turning up a new subscriber in a partner Operational Support System (OSS) will result in all of the required parameters being set on the MetaSwitch to enable the subscriber.

A second type of testing is Quality Assurance testing (QA), which involves creating a set of test cases that push the limits of capacity or exercise all of the capabilities of a product.

And Finally...

Congratulations to Fujitsu Network Services for winning the International Engineering Consortium's Infovision Award at the recent Broadband World Forum conference!

Although best known as an equipment manufacturer, Fujitsu also operates a state-of-the-art VoIP network based on MetaSwitch's softswitch and media gateway technology. Their Managed VoIP Network was one of Europe's first hosted solutions for large corporate and public sector enterprises, and was recognized by the IEC in the Network & Services Management & Operations category.