Cedar Point packages up cable voice

Cedar Point Communications announced what it’s calling its “QuickStart” program that packages everything necessary for a cable operator to get into the telephony market.

Unveiled at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association’s national Show in Chicago this week, the package includes the company’s Safari C³ Media Switching System with other necessary infrastructure in a single seven-foot rack. Cedar Point combined on the show floor its Safari with a Tellabs Cablespan telephony distribution system and Arris’s customer premise equipment.

Safari, which uses some of the PacketCable specifications but isn’t yet certified by CableLabs, can handle up 100,000 lines per shelf. The CableLabs certification waves that are moving forward have yet to take into account an integration solution such as the Sarari, said Dave Spear, executive vice president of strategy and market development for Cedar Point. But don’t call it a softswitch. “The softswitch guys are trying to say that if you buy from multiple vendors, you will get the cost down,” Spear said. “What you end up doing it going from a single box that could be managed to five or six boxes that are managed separately. You’ve created an operational nightmare.”

Cedar Point has been testing its solution with Comcast outside of Philadelphia.