When residents of Albany, Minn., tire of walking the path on the west side of town that leads to The Lake Wobegon Trail, they can sit in front of their televisions and amuse themselves with those two silly little features that come with Albany Mutual Telephone Association's Digital TV service: Caller-ID screen pops and an online programming guide.

To Tom Eveslage, central office supervisor and wearer of many hats at Albany, the best thing about it is that his company can provide these toys-turned-necessities at no additional cost in infrastructure, thanks to the integration and features of Nortel Networks' session initiation protocol (SIP)-based DMS-10s and Pannaway Technology's access solutions.

“Most deployments require some sort of adjunct box that can run between $50- and $200 grand,” Eveslage said. “With the copper and fiber broadband access switches from Pannaway, we can integrate the caller-ID pops with name and number without the adjunct.”

Albany began billing for its IPTV-based service around November 2005. Prior to that, the company used a few “friendlies” — customers willing to be guinea pigs — to help it work out the kinks. But the path to triple-play services was longer than the Wobegon Trail; it began in 2002 with a survey of customers' desire for such technology.

“There's no use doing a business case and pursuing it if we can't float the boat,” Eveslage said. “So we did our due diligence and found it would be well-received.”

Assured that it knew what the people wanted, Albany also knew it had to get out in front of competitors that would be bringing their own triple-play package down the road. “We thought it wouldn't be long before they would start offering voice, so we thought we would be first to offer all three,” Eveslage said.

Albany is 20 miles west of St. Cloud and 80 miles northwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. It serves three exchanges in the towns of Albany, Freeport and New Munich. The company had planned to roll out its service in phases, but in 2004 — spurred on by a new cable company coming to town — it deployed in all three towns, plus a few remote areas served by remote digital loop carriers.

With a fairly new outside plant, its copper was in good shape, and Albany went with ADSL2+ over copper in some areas to leverage that investment. It currently pushes 20 Mb/s across those facilities.

“As time goes on, though, we're talking about deploying more fiber in those areas,” Eveslage said.

Whether it's fiber or copper, Pannaway's Service Convergence Network and Nortel's DMS-10 SIP upgrade are supporting both. Pannaway has put a lot of effort into pre-integrating its product with major suppliers to the independent market. In addition to Nortel, the company currently interoperates with MetaSwitch and CopperCom.

“One of the biggest reasons we were selected by Albany was because of our integration with the bigger vendors,” said Scott Dunbar, senior software quality assurance engineer for Pannaway. “It's a small list, but we sell to the rural telcos, and those are the three they use.”

Albany is using Pannaway's fiber Broadband Access Switches, fiber Residential Gateways and Broadband Aggregation Routers as well as its Broadband Access Manager.

Pannaway is one of the few companies that entered the market as a SIP-based technology. It has actually had to reverse-engineer support for MGCP, another protocol used for transitioning from TDM-based networks to IP.

“We have brought the complexity of an IP Ethernet environment to a very common denominator and made it easy to understand for a wide berth of people that haven't been exposed to it,” Dunbar said.

With five new subdivisions and two new industrial parks built over the last year, Albany may have gotten out in front of its competition just in time and with just enough bandwidth.

“We made the decision to deploy fiber to those areas because bandwidth is king, and customers will decide who [to do business with] based on the amount of bandwidth they can achieve,” Eveslage said.