Midwest conservatives put on triple-play display

SIGECOM LLC may be a small-market cable provider, but the Evansville, Ind.-based company has solved two big problems. It has proved its case for the elusive triple play, a bundle of cable TV, telephony and high-speed Internet service. And it has implemented a single operations support system from Telution that can manage all three.

SIGECOM is a subsidiary of Boston-based Utilicom Networks and a joint venture between Utilicom and Vectren Corp. The company has built an 880-mile hybrid fiber/coax cable network that serves approximately 27,000 business and consumer customers in Evansville and Newburgh, Ind.

“With that footprint, we have become the dominant provider of cable TV service in four short years,” said David Smith, president and general manager of SIGECOM.

The company did so, in part, by providing Internet service, which its entrenched competitor Insight Communications did not offer, and added to that local and long-distance telephone service.

“The key to offering the triple play is being able to do telephony billing and rating, and have an addressable link from our order management and billing systems through the cable TV box controller,” Smith said. “Telution is one of the only systems that would let us operate in both the telephone and cable environment effectively.”

Kent Steffen, CEO of the Chicago-based OSS provider, calls his company Midwest conservative. Telution’s conservative approach has helped it weather the storm in the OSS space, picking up a variety of customers that demonstrate the broad range of its COMX OSS solution. In addition to proving its ability to support a cable company’s bundled offering, Telution is providing software for MCI’s Neighborhood service and recently announced its contract with ITC^DeltaCom, an integrated communications provider to the Southern U.S.

“The size of the business doesn’t matter, we’re solving the same business problems,” Steffen said.

Besides its ability to provide the triple play from a technology standpoint, Smith said his company’s competitive advantage is its customer focus, which is enhanced by the software it has deployed. “We are very close to our customers. Telution puts us even closer by giving us the tools that our order management staff and customer care staff need to address issues quickly,” Smith said.