BellSouth launches integrated access

BellSouth has inaugurated its first integrated access platform for small businesses and enterprise branch offices, offering integrated voice and data services over individual T-1 and ISDN lines.

Called BellSouth Integrated Solutions, the service launched last week throughout its incumbent territory and using Larscom customer premise equipment. BellSouth has tailored the offerings to start at a basic eight voice lines and 128 kb/s of Internet capacity for $639 per month for a dedicated T-1 and $120 a month for a PRI circuit. Customers can then add an individual voice line or additional 64 kb/s for $30 a channel.

"Essentially we’re seeing competitive inroads from the CLECs for integrated access," said Nimesh Shah, senior direct for data product management at BellSouth. "We wanted to be able to go head-to-head with those competitive offers with something other than soft bundles."

BellSouth officials expect the market for integrated access in its territory to top $500 million, divided evenly between the growing small business market and the established enterprises searching for cost savings. While BellSouth risks cannibalizing some existing lines in the cases where customers provision separate data and voice lines, the company expects that most of those losses will be offset by the new services it can sell to integrated access customers.

BellSouth senior marketing manager Brian Hollister said that many BellSouth enterprise customers use the carrier solely for voice service so the new integrated access services represent a new sales channel for selling those businesses data. As for customers that use BellSouth for both data and voice, BellSouth hopes to offset any potential loss of T-1 revenue with a new suite of VPN and managed services the new platform allows. As for small business, the new platform gives BellSouth a competitive means of going after business the CLECs have locked in.

"More customers will hopefully upgrade their services when they go to integrated access," Hollister said. "There’s a lot of layering that can happen here."

BellSouth is hoping one of the biggest appeals to small business will be the flexibility of its offering. Along with the usual single-interface, single-point-of-contract and single-bill advantages of such a service, BellSouth is allowing customers to mold their service to their own needs, adding new voice lines or data channels as they please and even allowing them to shift a data channel to a voice channel or vice-versa as they please. BellSouth also hopes to use the platform as a jumping off point to voice over IP services in the future.