Cover is a high-rise triple-play service provider of voice, Internet, and video.  We specialize in bringing an enterprise level of service to the residential environment with the purpose of catering to at-home professionals. We target commercial and residential multi-dwelling and multi-tenant (MDU/MTU) facilities.  Cover’s in-house engineers design, build, implement and test various wired and wireless solutions for existing and new construction from start to finish.

Currently, Cover Networks offers high quality digital video, high speed Internet solutions, and digital voice services at a local level to the end user at prices well below industry averages. However, the future is to design wide-area wireless networks, which will talk directly to all consumers within a given area. Our wireless system will provide an alternative for consumers in any market and can be constructed overnight. Through this action, the virtual utilities that the Internet, phone, and cable television industries have become in the 21st Century can be changed fundamentally in the aspects of price and quality.

Cover Networks is the force that will accomplish this service for the consumers of the United States.

 

In 2005, Cover realized that it needed to be competitive and add VoIP phone service to its offering. With companies like Vonage (News - Alert) moving into the area, it was imperative to find a feature-rich and cost effective platform to actualize a quicker ROI.

 

“Cover looked at solutions such as Broadsoft and Cilantro,” stated Josh Buehler, Network Architect. “Although these are very good solutions, I realized that we simply could not afford getting into the market for $250,000.00 or more. I alternately looked at Fonality (News - Alert) and TrixBox. These were extremely cost effective, however, they did not have a clean user interface and were not intended to be Enterprise level solutions, especially in a provider space. In essence, we were looking at development kits that did not solve our situation.”

 

Cover’s vision was to build load-balanced Asterisk (News - Alert) servers while utilizing SER to compensate for any shortcomings that Asterisk may have. Cover purchased three servers to accomplish this goal. Cover quickly realized that it did not have the expertise to do this correctly and ran into a dead end immediately. Initially Cover felt that it had enough Asterisk experience to create its own desired solution. Cover quickly realized that it would have to hire a Software developer and a Unix programmer to make this happen. The cost to hire this type of expertise would easily reach six-figure salaries and take at least six months of development, not to mention the continued salary to keep sufficiently staffed to support the solution.

 

Cover finally successfully configured one Asterisk server, but still had not solved the following issues that resulted from not having a proper solution:

 

·        There was no end-user interface to compete with Vonage

·        No redundancy

·        No Scalability

·        No SER

·        No Support

·        No ability to truly offer an enterprise solution.

 

 

Mid-2005, Cover networks discovered the Comms Provider Platform. Cover realized that in order to truly be competitive and offer a feature rich cost effective solution, it would need to move off its home-grown product and onto a solution such as Comms.

 

“The Comms Provider Platform was truly the best solution for us, not to mention it was a fraction of the cost of other proprietary Solutions,” stated Buehler. “To go one step further, I did not have to hire anyone internally to achieve our desired architecture.  Comms would have solved our issues a couple years ago if we had found them first. Not only does Comms provide us with all of the necessary interfaces to meet our customer and administration need, it allows me to run the business and not have to worry about development or support.”