Ellacoya finding success with utilities

Ellacoya Networks, a broadband network service control systems provider, is finding a market niche among utility companies offering broadband services.

New Hampshire-based Ellacoya recently released a list of 13 customers, and many of the names belonged to utilities such as Cedar Falls Utilities, Coldwater Board of Public Utilities, Murray Electric System and Muscatine Power & Water and Partner Communications. In each instance, the utility offers broadband data services and sees a need to control subscriber usage.

“The utilities have a very strong sense of fairness because that’s their heritage,” said Varun Nagaraj, Ellacoya’s executive vice president of marketing. “They provide water, electricity and they charge for what you use.”

That’s not the case with cable’s broadband services, where the usual practice is to open an “all-you-can-eat” pipe for consumption. This, said Nagaraj, leads to bandwidth hogs who gobble up more space than they deserve and slow things down for other customers.

“The solution we have enables fairness and customer satisfaction through measuring traffic patterns, measuring different applications, the amount of traffic generated in consumer applications,” he said. It then allows the provider to set polices “to ensure fair use or to shift demand from one time to the other.”

While Ellacoya has lined up two “Tier 1” cable operators as customers--although they won’t allow their names to be disclosed--the main base of support comes from smaller operators and overbuilders. “Their decision-making tends to be a little sooner,” he said.

And utilities take a big share of that space.

“The notion that when people are paying the same amount there ought to be a level of fairness among use is one the utilities can appreciate and relate to very easily,” Nagaraj said. “That would explain why we’ve had disproportionate success with the utilities.”