HOMEWARD BOUND: THE RACE TO CLAIM CONTROL OF NEW DEVELOPMENTS

Condominiums are a tough market to crack. Building associations and individual developers wield a lot of power and can often dictate what services go into a building and which carrier provides them. For a telco, condos offer an opportunity to gain a lot of customers quickly or lose them for good in the blink of an eye.

Bell Canada came to that realization last year. Instead of marketing its ExpressView satellite service to individual condo owners, Bell Canada used Motorola/Next Level's integrated access platform to move very high bit-rate DSL into the buildings themselves and began piping its video programming feeds over fiber directly into the buildings' basements. It added high-speed data along with its standard voice services. The experiment was a success, said Martin Cullom, Bell Canada's general manager of video networks. The carrier plans to take its five-building trial to the rest of downtown Toronto in January.

“We're focused on getting ahead in the multidwelling unit market,” Cullom said. “We felt a terrestrial solution was the most viable way to do that. Not only are we able to bundle high-speed data and video to these customers, we're paving the way for evolving services: video-on-demand and interactive TV.”

Bell Canada is just a company making innovative use of integrated access platforms to deploy services in areas where competition is high and speed to market matters. In many cases, carriers like Bell Canada aren't even deploying the triple-play services considered to be the Holy Grail of integrated access. Bell Canada's augmented network is a fiber overlay to the existing copper network, and while the Motorola/Next Level platform is capable of handling voice, video and data, it chose to switch telephony off its legacy network back to the CO.

Other carriers aren't even looking to roll out video services. Several are using digital loop carriers and other integrated access platforms to deploy standard DSL and voice services, while others branch into voice over IP.

“It's flexibility our customers are looking for,” said Jeff Weber, vice president of advanced technology for Motorola/Next Level. “They want to be able to mix and match different deployment scenarios, but use the same operational platform.”

Pineville Telephone was a company that wasn't just looking for flexibility. It was looking for nimbleness. Launched in 1935, Pineville is one of the old municipal telephone companies that were grandfathered under the first telecom act. The tiny telco has been running its tiny network of 2000 access lines within the town's old city limits as established in 1974.

Pineville, a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., has grown considerably in the last 29 years, but its territory has not grown with the city limits, which is served instead by BellSouth. Pineville Telephone, however, decided to use the 1996 Telecom Act to grow back into its city limits as a CLEC, and it decided to do so with Catena's broadband loop carrier.

What ensued was a race to new homes between the city of Pineville and BellSouth, both of which were building infrastructure out to the same greenfield developments. As new developments go up, Pineville Telephone is putting Catena CN1000s in the middle of them, supplying the facilities for 100% voice and DSL penetration often before BellSouth even knows the developments are coming, said Joel Williams, a consultant with MidSouth consulting engineers and co-manager of Pineville Telephone.

“Since the city runs the telecom utility, we have an unfair advantage,” Williams said. “We find out about a new development as soon as the developer files the plans with our planning commission.”

And Pineville certainly takes advantage of its early warning system. In one instance, Pineville rush-ordered a digital loop carrier from Catena, and within a day of its arrival Catena and Pineville had it “set, spliced and operational,” Williams said. Because the city of Pineville also runs the power utility, it has access to all the electrical poles free of charge. Factor in that Pineville doesn't have to pay its own franchise fees or taxes, and the tiny carrier does have a significant head start on the Bell. Still, competition being what it is, and considering Pineville doesn't have the economies of scale the RBOC has, it's a tough race.

“Our marketing plan has always been to be cheaper than the Bell and faster than the Bell,” Williams said. By keeping its DLC footprints small — one DLC covering a 5000-square-foot area — it can not only deploy and provision its networks faster than BellSouth, it can keep loop lengths short. Catena's broadband loop carrier provisions both DSL and POTS on every line, and Pineville can guarantee DSL to every home and faster broadband speeds than its competitors.

Catena said similar strategies are starting to emerge all over the country. “Like in Pineville, we're seeing land grab situations, to see who can get their lines in first,” said Gary Bolton, vice president of product marketing for the company. “Deploying a broadband loop carrier accelerates your time to market. You can deploy it quickly, and when it's deployed you can address different demands.”

Addressing demands as they come is a key reason why carriers are deploying integrated access platforms. While most carriers aren't using Catena or Next Level's platforms for triple-play services just yet, most of them are considering it.

Both Catena's and Next Level's solutions are designed to take optical upgrades on the same chassis, meaning all of their customers can upgrade to fiber-to-home solutions by changing out line cards. And just as the integrated access platforms are built to handle POTS, they're designed to handle voice over IP when the time is ripe.

Bell Canada in Toronto is toying with bringing voice onto its Next Level platform, negotiating with developers to string fiber through new condos and aggregate voice, video and data traffic from the same basement remote terminal. Because of the split architecture of the Next Level platform, which keeps the broadband digital terminal in the central office, Bell Canada can handle the dual traffic requirements of triple-play fiber from a new development and the data and video from older buildings from the same box.

But just as Bell Canada can use an integrated access platform to give it an advantage over a cable company or other competitor, Bell Canada's competitors can use a similar platform to gain an advantage over the Canadian incumbent. While Bell Canada is busy locking up new condo developments in downtown Toronto, CLEC FCI Broadband is using a Catena platform to beat Bell Canada to new developments in the suburbs.

Using the CN 1000, FCI is locking up neighborhoods of 5000 to 10,000 homes using the Catena infrastructure to offer instant service to homebuyers. “When they first move into their homes there's a future wave phone and a new phone number waiting for them,” said Jay Gowens, vice president of engineering operations at FCI. “Speed to market certainly helps in this business.”