Net Insight wins Matanuska Tel contract

Net Insight announced that Matanuska Telephone Association has deployed its Ethernet-based Nimbra platform as part of its video-over-DSL service.

MTA, the largest telephone cooperative in Alaska, has been testing video over its existing copper infrastructure for several months and plans to roll out the service to about 18,000 member-owners over 33,000 access lines by the end of the year. The Nimbra platform will act as the transport element over the company’s backbone.

“We acquire the content from the digital head end and set up tunnels across their backbone,” said Dan Lutter, vice president of North American sales for Net Insight, which is based in Stockholm, Sweden. “We’re actually doing a layer 2 multicast that acts like a meshed network. We can provide strict QoS across those tunnels.”

MTA deployed Net Insight’s platform without any significant changes to its existing network. The carrier also is using DSLAMs from Allied Telesyn to provide its triple play services.

Net Insight, which also has deployed Nimbra with Midwest Tel Net, a consortium of independents in southern Wisconsin, uses a gigabit connection from the head (in the case of both MTA and MTN, it’s a Minerva headend) to feed signals into the access network. The platform, which will be on the Rural Utilities Service approved list by the end of the summer, can hand off signals either via ATM or Sonet, Lutter said. In many cases, carriers are using one or the other to feed content to other independents, he added.

“We see this trend going on where an IOC may have invested a digital headend but it’s costing them $2 million,” Lutter said. “One way to make money off that is sell the signal to neighboring companies.”