Cavalier Telephone new SIP trunking part of ‘a la carte’ approach

Cavalier Telephone is aiming to differentiate its new session initiation protocol trunking service, launched yesterday, by offering small- and medium-sized business customers an “a la carte” approach.

“You can buy access, firewall or backup, and they’re all layered on,” said Lou Sommi, senior vice president of marketing for Cavalier.

Underlying Cavalier’s offering are softswitches from Metaswitch, which the carrier now has deployed throughout its network.

“It’s built with a lot of flexibility,” Sommi said. “You can pick the encoding scheme, the bandwidth and the number of concurrent calls. It has a lot of features that are not on most TDM and SIP trunks.”

Customers can combine SIP traffic with other IP-based traffic such as Internet communications or virtual private networks over a single Ethernet link. “You can pick 1 meg up to 1 gig with an IP trunk,” Sommi said.

The new offering is also complementary with cloud-based services from Cavalier, such as electronic data backup and virtualized servers, Sommi added.

Cavalier’s new SIP trunking service has been tested with about a half dozen types of IP-PBX systems. Technicians also test each specific IP-PBX system as part of the installation process. “Testing has gotten to where it’s very simple and streamlined to do as part of the installation,” Sommi said.

Cavalier, a CLEC launched more than a decade ago, has been an aggressive player in Ethernet-over-copper and, through its Intellifiber Networks unit, in the burgeoning low-latency fiber market.