BigBand lands Comporium

LAS VEGAS-- BigBand Networks announced at the USTA Telecom ’04 show today that Comporium Communications, a 100,000-line incumbent carrier serving the Rock Hill, S.C., area, has chosen several systems as part of an expansion of its existing video services.

Comporium, which has both a twisted pair network for voice and data as well as fiber/coax network traditional cable services, will use BigBand’s BMR1200 (Broadband Multimedia-Service Router), BRE20 (Broadband Real-Time Encoder), Cuda12000 CMTS (cable modem termination system) and FastFlow BPM (Broadband Provisioning Manager) to provide IP television, digital cable and high-speed data.

For customers that sit in the traditional ILEC area, the company will source video from its cable headend and transport video over twisted pair.

"We’re going to put out video, after its encoded, either through QAM [for cable subscribers] or via Ethernet [for telco customers]," said Seth Kenvin, vice president of strategic marketing and corporate development for BigBand.

Comporium, which has been installing Occam Networks’ access platform as part of a major expansion across all of its areas, has been pushing to merge their two systems together for some time and has been experimenting with numbers architectures, said Dan Smith, vice president of engineering and planning for Comporium.

"We wanted to make sure we put in an architecture that would migrate to IP in the future," he said. "But the fact is that we have 55,000 cable subscribers and we can’t just throw them away."