Network diagram for Blackfoot Telephone
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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.net.
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