Occam Networks typically hides in the “Others” wedge in pie charts depicting DSL broadband loop carrier, or BLC, global market share. With about 201,000 ports shipped in the first nine months of last year, according to broadbandtrends.com, Occam ranked ninth in the market while Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Huawei Technologies took the lead.

But last year Occam found a captive audience in Ontario, Canada. Last December, the vendor announced a slew of customer wins among Canadian independent operating carriers (IOCs) — 10 telcos over a period of about 18 months. Occam now claims to supply two-thirds of Ontario's IOCs.

Taking its name from the 14th century English friar, who posited that simpler explanations are superior, Occam strove for simplicity in designing its pure-IP, Ethernet platform.

“Customers tell us we turn up faster, with superior tools for troubleshooting and that adding new products to a ring is simple,” said Russ Sharer, vice president of marketing for Occam.

That ease of use helped lead Ontario's Wightman Telecom to pick Occam in early 2005. Competing products were “cumbersome” to operate, said Rick Hill, the company's network manager. “We field-trialed one in particular — my field technicians just shuddered.”

Occam's gear also interoperated well with that of Wightman's softswitch supplier, MetaSwitch, which helped seal the deal.

The long, thin network routes in rural Canada encourage IOCs there to consider a pure-IP platform like Occam's. One such IOC, Ontera, began trialing Occam's gear in late 2005 when the capacity on its existing DSLAMs began to run out. “Under the gun,” as transport infrastructure manager Wayne Lynch tells it, Ontera took the suggestion of Nexicom, another Canadian IOC that began reselling Occam's gear in Canada in mid 2005 (in the U.S., Occam uses a variety of resellers). Occam's gear saved Ontera from having to deploy fiber to business customers wanting 10 Mb/s Ethernet connections.

“We can squeeze more out of our copper plant with this,” Lynch said.

Though Canadian IOCs have been more aggressive than their counterparts in the states about upping broadband speeds, Sharer said they haven't pursued IPTV with as much vigor.

“[Canadian IOCs] are much further ahead with 3, 5, 8 Mb/s DSL and not quite as far along with IPTV,” he said. Sharer isn't sure why, guessing that lower population densities make it harder for Canadian carriers to deliver the kind of data rates IPTV requires. Canadians also are having trouble with video content, which is heavily regulated by the government.

American IOCs will soon gain access to turnkey video programming packages through a shared satellite service provided by the National Rural Telephone Cooperative and obtained through the combined purchasing power of small telcos. But Canadian telcos don't appear to have an equivalent program thus far.

In fact, as far as Occam is aware, none of the 10 Ontario IOCs deploying its gear are using it to deliver IPTV. However, some of them plan to do so eventually. Wightman will deploy video one day, Hill said, though he doesn't know when. And when that time comes, Occam's ADSL2+ gear will help, he said. VDSL2 might serve AT&T well, handling IPTV in dense urban areas, Hill said, but its reach is too short for the vast, lonely fields of Wightman's footprint.

“With ADSL2+, we're pretty confident we could be up to two miles from the customer,” Hill said.

“We're watching the VDSL2 arena,” Sharer said. “There's lot of misinformation out there about VDSL2's rate and reach capabilities. We're watching to see if gets cleaned up in the next generation of products. We're big believers in bonded ADSL2+.”

Some U.S. telcos are using Occam's BLCs to deploy IPTV, including North Carolina's FairPoint Communications and South Carolina's Farmers Telephone Cooperative. Those American carriers are, in turn, influencing the buying decisions of Canadian telcos — even those with no immediate IPTV plans.

“We talked to lot of people in the U.S., and a lot of them kept coming back to Occam,” Hill said.

OCCAM'S ONTARIO IOC CUSTOMERS

Ontera
Cochrane Telecom Services
Execulink
Gosfield North Communications
Huron Telecommunications
Nexicom Group
North Renfrew Telecom
Quadro Communications
Roxborough Telephone
WTC Communications

Source: Occam Networks