Pannaway and Genband deploy jointly at Ritter

Pannaway Technologies and Genband will begin deploying their combined broadband solutions for the competitive local exchange carrier business of Arkansas-based Ritter Communications, making it an even dozen joint implementations for the two vendors.

Ritter will use Genband’s G6 Universal Media Gateway and Pannaway’s Service Convergence Network (SCN) to deploy, provision and manage its new IP and Ethernet-based copper and fiber-based broadband equipment and services.

The SCN consists of Pannaway’s Broadband Aggregation Routers (BAR), its ADSL2+ and Active Ethernet fiber Broadband Access Switches (BAS) and Residential Gateway NIDs (RGN) The BAR delivers Gigabit Ethernet transport and can scale to 10 Gbps.

“We did a lot of work before we introduced this joint solution on the Pannaway front and Genband is now part of every new release”, said Kevin Brown, vice president of marketing at Pannaway. “We do a lot of pre-testing and integration, so it is a very tight integration from a partnership standpoint. “

Together, the SCN and Genband’s G6 Universal Media Gateway will enable Ritter to offer traditional telephony, voice over IP (VoIP), high-speed data and other multi-media services including video conferencing and medical imaging to its more than 4000 business customers in the banking, healthcare, city government, real estate and insurance market sectors.

The 100-year-old Ritter is the principal broadband services provider to The Mall at Turtle Creek in Jonesboro, Ark, a 750,000 square foot retail complex with more than 70 retailers and broadband customers.

‘If you look at both products, they give the flexibility to change as a business changes. If its MGCP today and SIP tomorrow or GigE today and 10-gig tomorrow, being able to move in those directions is attractive to a business network,” Brown said.

Since re-tooling its media gateway product line to also fit the IOC market a year ago, Genband has joined Pannaway in serving independent telcos around the country, including: Nsight Telservices of Wisconsin, Polar Communications of North Dakota, Waitsfield and Champlain Valley Telecom of Vermont, KM Telecom of Minnesota, ETEX Telephone Cooperative of Texas and Warwick Valley Telecommunications of New York.

At its launch six years ago, Genband, then General bandwidth, built its media gateway for the Tier 1 carrier market. Through acquisitions such as Syndeo last year and its own efforts to take cost out of its products through new generations of chip technology, working with manufacturers to improve densities and making use of Intel servers, Linux operating systems and less expensive database technology, came out with gateway and softswitch technology for the IOC market.

“We have done a fantastic job of creating one of the lowest cost media gateways in the world, even compared to offshore technologies,” said Jody Bennett, vice president of marketing at Genband.