[January 20, 2005]

VoIP Keeps Crawling Into Rural America

BY JOHANNE TORRES

A company named Great Plains Communications (GPC) decided to replace its 31,000-line Class 5 switching infrastructure with CopperCom's Converged Switching eXchange (CSX) softswitches during the next five years. According to GPC, the company selected CopperCom for its advantages in supporting both packet and circuit technology and operating in host/remote configurations throughout its rural Nebraska serving area.

GPC delivers local and long distance telecommunications services, high-speed Internet access and cable television services to more than 80 rural communities. The company, which has been family-owned for nearly 100 years, saw this implementation necessary to add next-generation services such as voice-over-IP (VoIP) and accommodate growth in T1 and PRI data services by replacing the Class 5 switching network with a next-generation solution.

"After spending a year and a half meeting and visiting with vendors, the quality of the CopperCom people and their commitment to the IOC market was a big deciding factor for us," says Jim Weston, Central Office engineering manager for Great Plains Communications. "We like the roadmap they laid out and felt they had a strong lead today in terms of host/remote capabilities. For the most part, other alternative suppliers don't offer that yet."

Great Plains Communications plans to replace at least five hosts and forty remote switches across its 14,000 square-mile serving area through 2009. Weston has big plans for Blair, Nebraska-based GPC. He says the service provider expects to leverage the Class 4 capabilities inherent on the CSX system as well as to consolidate tandem switching between remote offices onto a single switching infrastructure.

Bob Kersey, VP of Marketing and Product Management for CopperCom says that the companies' shared philosophy makes for a great fit. "Great Plains Communications is updating its infrastructure in order to bring subscribers in rural areas the latest services and greatest value possible. Such flexibility is the reason we build so much functionality into our softswitch. We're honored to work with an IOC of Great Plains' stature that continually puts its customers first."

Great Plains Communications
www.gpcom.com

CopperCom, Inc.
www.coppercom.com