Having firmly established its softswitch technology in the independent and competitive telephone markets, MetaSwitch is expanding its focus to the cable TV industry, announcing a new product platform designed to let cable companies provide business VoIP services.

The company’s new product -- cleverly called COMPETE! -- Cable Operator Multiservice Platform for Enhanced Telephony Evolution – is already in deployment at 10 cable operators, MetaSwitch announced today, including Clear Creek Telephone & TeleVision, Cunningham Communications, Penasco Valley Telecommunications and Vidia Communications. COMPETE provides hosted PBX, unified communications and integrate T-1 capabilities for cable companies that are now turning their attention to the business market.

The move into the cable industry was a natural one, said Andy Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch, especially since some of his company’s independent telcos also operate as cable companies. In addition, the cable industry’s growing interest in business revenues and the shift to an IP Multi-media Subsystems (ISM) approach by Cable Labs helped pave the way into this new market.

“Most of the cable companies were doing Packet Cable 1.0, which uses a flavor of MGCP [Media Gateway Control Protocol], known as MCS,” he said. “That was fine for residential service, but not for business. From a market perspective, more cable operators now are coming to us saying they want a solution for SIP [Session Initiation Protocol] – which is part of Packet Cable 2. That fits with what we are doing, and with the business imperative cable operators have. They have cable passing all these businesses, but when they only doing TV, not much to offer. Now they can sell high-speed Internet and voice.”

Cable companies are moving to IMS, he added, which is another motivation to seek new VoIP platforms that fit that infrastructure. MetaSwitch is offering the option for bundled capabilities that allow Tier 2 and Tier 3 cable operators to offer differentiated services without requiring heavy-duty integration skills.

“IMS is the direction that Cable Labs is going in,” Randall said. “The cable companies are building on IMS, integrating services with the TV set, and their high-speed data and voice. We are working with middleware vendors to pre-integrate with the middleware to allow not just Caller ID on the TV screen, but picture caller ID, voice mails and emails on the TV. There is absolutely interest in cross-platform applications, with a focus on how do you differentiate above and beyond your basic telephony, and that’s were we can help them put together an overall solution.”

MetaSwitch is working with multiple middleware vendors to assure that application programming interfaces (APIs) operate correctly and manage integration of multiple technologies prior to deployment.

The movement to a new architecture is a major challenge for smaller companies, especially as they start putting multiple services onto a single network, he added, because the network design challenges become that much more difficult. Layered on top of that is the movement into the new world of voice services.

Penasco Valley Telecommunications, one of MetaSwitch’s early cable companies, is moving its voice services from a Packet Cable 1.0 infrastructure to the MetaSwitch COMPETE platform, and thus far, has had favorable reaction from customers who noticed the improvement in voice quality, Randall said.

“We needed a dense, scalable platform with the support necessary to serve both residential and business customers, and take us forward on a future-proof architecture based on IMS,” said Mark Reams, chief business officer for PVT, in a prepared statement. “We have been positively surprised by how quickly and easily we were able to install the MetaSwitch and migrate our existing customers.”

“We see a lot of customers struggling with the transition from a basic IP network to a carrier-grade IP network, with Quality of Service and redundancy,” Randall said. “Customers may be willing for you to reboot their router, but they don’t want their phone service to go down.”