Big River Telephone Co. started off in 2001 as a typical CLEC, targeting small to mid-sized businesses with traditional voice services, initially as a reseller of UNE-P lines but then on its own facilities, serving rural communities in southeastern Missouri. But the company soon found another, more lucrative, market, as a wholesale VoIP provider to smaller cable companies who wanted to provide residential voice service.

Today, Big River is operating in seven states – Missouri, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Mississippi and Arkansas – as a wholesale VoIP provider to cable companies who are bringing local voice competition to communities where it never existed before and finding success competing with incumbent telcos – particularly very large ones, said Jerry Howe, chief executive officer.

Now the company is taking on its next challenge – helping its cable customers tackle the small to mid-sized business market, Howe says.

The key for his cable customers is their local presence, particularly in towns where the incumbent telco is AT&T or another large company that doesn’t always have local feet on the street.

“The cable guys are on the street, they are the local folks and they can provide better customer service,” Howe said. “Plus, we can give them IP Centrex with a robust feature set that they can use to replace a PBX or key system. Already, our customers have taken out a lot of Centrex for AT&T customers, where they were paying for a lot of features they weren’t even using.”

One of the keys to making its wholesale business work has been the automation of its order entry process, something Big River accomplished working with its softswitch vendor, Metaswitch. “We can handle gobs of one-line orders,” Howe said. “We have automated the interface between our order entry and Metaswitch and we are also putting in electronic orderes to AT&T as well.”

Smaller cable operators, like their larger brethren, want to offer a triple play bundle, Howe said, and Big River is enabling that by wholesaling the voice service and offering them DOCSIS-compliant service.

“We have partnered with companies that served rural communities where they had never seen competition, and given consumers a choice for the first time,” Howe said. “Where people weren’t happy with the incumbent, we can offer them unlimited voice at $35 a month, with enhanced voice mail.”

The cable operators in smaller communities that are served by large incumbents can take advantage of the fact that these areas are sometimes the last places to get network upgrades and new technologies, because they are low-density areas, he said.

“In some cases, there are local incumbents,” Howe commented. “But we see a different level of dissatisfaction with large carriers in the rural areas. They don’t know they exist, they aren’t on the map for new technology. Sometimes a rural LEC can be hamstrung by a lack of capital or the ability to deploy new technology or an aversion to risk. But usually they are in there trying. It’s different with larger incumbents.”

Big River’s cable customers are seeing 15% to 20% penetration in phone lines in their first year of deployment, Howe said. Their voice offerings are intended as primary line replacements and come with E911 compliant, CALEA-compliance, power backup, etc. from the outset.

Big River is now helping those same customers learn more about marketing and how to approach the SMB market, including understanding what customers need through site surveys and sorting through the technology requirements for business voice.

“We started off with lower line counts but we are making more complex connections, and getting more PRI requests,” Howe said. “WE have helped them understand that there are different types of PRI service and you have to know what flavor of PRI the customer needs. If you don’t do it right, you can get a bad reputation pretty quickly. We are helping them avoid that.”