Michigan's Bloomingdale Telephone Co. and Mississippi's Noxapater Telephone Co. said this week they are using Tekelec's 7000 Class 5 Packet Switch to migrate to their next-generation architectures.

Noxapater will deploy by the end of this year. Bloomingdale, which has been serving residential and business customers in the Bloomingdale, Mich., area since 1904, will employ a "cap and grow" strategy to transition its traditional customers to IP and to expand into the greater southwest Michigan area.

In addition to local and long-distance service, Bloomingdale offers cable and satellite television, wireless phone services and networking. It will deploy Tekelec's Packet Interface Card to provide IP connectivity for advanced multimedia services. The service provider also will deploy Tekelec's Meritus and TelAssist software applications in order to offer hosted business voice services over its existing network equipment.

Meritus enables the delivery of hosted voice services including PBX or key system features such as group logic, call control, feature activation and subscriber management. TelAssist allows subscribers to control telephone services from a personal computer.

"Bloomingdale is making a market choice to get started with a capable set of features through a hosted service in both POTS and an IP environments," said Mark Whittier, vice president of marketing at Tekelec. "It is a way to both have a competitive offering against other hosted or VoIP providers and an opportunity for new revenue."

Whittier also said the open interface card on the 7000 makes it easy for service providers to transition to Tekelec's full application server when they are ready to go aggressively after larger business customers and broader feature sets.

For both companies, the Tekelec 7000 switch is allowing them to begin providing features and services similar to VoIP immediately while being able to transition to IP at their own pace.

The Tekelec 7000 is based on a switch-on-a-card design through which each interface card performs the end-office switch functions, including a complete set of CLASS and customer calling services. Each card provides dedicated resources for call processing, service logic, switch fabric, media processing and signaling. Configured with a VoIP interface card, the switch can deliver voice in many packet telephony applications. It provides a foundation for service providers to migrate to multimedia service offerings.

"The 7000 was aimed all along at the small-to medium-size service provider because it gives them a cost-effective platform that provides all the Class 5 services such as CALEA compliance, LNP and E-911 that you would associate with a device that costs 10 times as much," Whittier said.

Meritus and TelAssist are not native IP services and are not part of the recently acquired VocalData product suite. They provide enhanced voice features for businesses over POTS lines without having expensive equipment or proprietary terminals at the customer premise.

These latest deployments push Tekelec's IOC switching customer list into the triple digits.