Pacific Island Carrier Launches New Cable Voice Offering Powered by MetaSwitch

IT&E goes deep with MetaSwitch solutions to provide Guam with first competitive residential telephone services

 

Honolulu, HI: January 14, 2008. MetaSwitch today announced at the Pacific Telecommunications Council, PTC '08, that IT&E, a leading Pacific islands carrier, has leveraged MetaSwitch's core switching and applications solutions to offer competitive residential phone service sold through the island's cable operator, MCV Broadband. The white label solution was recently deployed after rigorous but rapid end-to-end testing, and currently counts more than 1,000 customers installed.

"For service providers in emerging markets like Guam, achieving competitive advantage is based on developing an efficient network capable of delivering a broad range of service offerings," said Andrew Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch. "IT&E has chosen to use MetaSwitch solutions as the 'hub' of its next-generation infrastructure, allowing the company to continuously expand its customer base by leveraging the best technology to quickly and cost effectively deliver new services."

MetaSwitch's core switching technology, combined with the MetaSphere suite of applications, enables IT&E to supply MCV Broadband with a robust feature set including: Find Me Follow Me, simultaneous ringing services and Unified Messaging, allowing subscribers access to voicemail, e-mail and fax messages through any email program or web browser. The offer also includes local service and either measured rate or unlimited long distance at pricing around 30 percent less than incumbents.

IT&E, a 28-year old carrier serving the 212-square mile U.S. territory in the Marianas island chain, initially deployed MetaSwitch technology to build on its history as a successful provider of long distance, PCS wireless and internet services to an existing customer base, including a thriving tourist industry. With MetaSwitch's support for access deployment and next-generation capabilities, IT&E transitioned to a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) and began to offer advanced IP-based business services such as conferencing and music-on-hold to its business customers and unified messaging to its residential customers through its partnership with MCV Broadband. These new capabilities allow IT&E to provide bundled services, becoming a full "one-stop" provider, and provide the necessary tools to evaluate rolling out new services over technologies like WiMax.

"In MetaSwitch, we really found a vendor that can 'do it all' - toll tandem, class 4 and class 5 offices - while meeting our requirements to support local number portability (LNP) and CALEA," said John Borlas, president of IT&E. "The MetaSwitch team worked extensively to ensure that we could turn our ideas into actual product offerings and MetaSwitch's commitment to its product has been central to our success so far. They've consistently delivered a quality of service and dedication to support that is among the best I've encountered in my 30-plus years in this industry."

A new case study featuring IT&E, "Growing with Guam: How IT&E Optimized its Network and Brought Real Telecom Competition to Guam" is available the MetaSwitch Booth, Booth 24, as well as on the MetaSwitch website, www.metaswitch.com.

Anthony Marcello, director of IOC operations for MetaSwitch, will be a featured speaker on the topic, "From Open Standards to Open Source: Telecom's Migration to Open Architectures and Grass Roots Driven Design," on January 14, from 3:30-5:00 HST, at the PTC Pavilion in the Hilton Hawaiian Beach Resort & Spa in Honolulu.

About MetaSwitch

MetaSwitch is an industry-leading vendor of switching and applications solutions for both packet and circuit-switched networks. Its MetaSphere service delivery platform and applications suite enables a broad set of hosted IP communications services, while its core session control and media/signaling gateway products support a full range of Class 4/5 softswitch capabilities. Customers include many of the world's leading operators of wireline, wireless and cable networks, with deployments that scale to millions of subscribers. For more information, please visit www.metaswitch.com.