IP at home on the high plains

ENMR Plateau is three companies in one: a rural telephone co-op serving 13,000 access lines in a 25,000-square mile segment of eastern New Mexico (or about one customer every two miles); a business CLEC competing with Qwest Communications and Windstream; and a broadband wireless company bringing broadband access to far-flung locations.

Now the underlying network for all of those operations is aggressively being converted to an IP infrastructure, with plans to be all-IP by 2010, said Buddy Vaughan, chief strategy officer for ENMR. Essential to that process is the replacement of Nortel DSM switches with a Metaswitch softswitch and the addition of 1000 miles of additional fiber optic cabling to connect new Occam Networks broadband digital loop carrier systems that are replacing copper-fed units from AFC and Nortel Networks.

“We have started converting our bigger exchanges — the top five are converted,” Vaughn said. “Where we used to have a DMS-100 and remote switches, we're using a distributed architecture of Metaswitch systems, with Call Agents in two locations and Media Gateways in multiple other locations, all connected with a fiber transport ring.”

For now, the IP signal is terminated at the Occam boxes, and service is delivered to customers over copper lines as ADSL2+ and TDM voice, Vaughn said, but that could change in the future. “We are going to stay with that for the moment,” he added. “The important thing to us was to get fiber out there so we could go to Ethernet service. It was an instant improvement for our existing customers; their broadband bandwidth growth and their experience improved.”

ENMR had started down the IPTV path, planning to use SES Americom as its wholesale provider, but has now taken a step back, Vaughn said. “We felt like we were getting caught up in the wave,” he said. “I'm still looking for a platform that will let us build applications on it. We want a platform that will allow us to integrate entertainment and communications.

The CLEC business began in 2004, when ENMR Plateau put fiber down the central business district of Clovis — the town is headquarters for the co-op, although Qwest is the incumbent there — and started giving businesses fiber connections, something Qwest wasn't doing. Today, the CLEC has branched out into in the New Mexican towns of Artesia, Carlsbad, Roswell and Tucumcari and also is taking on Windstream.

The wireless broadband business was “an opportunity to get into another revenue-generating business” based on what incumbents weren't doing, Vaughn said.

“Qwest was struggling with DSL — they were focused on Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Cruses,” he said. Using WiMAX technology, ENMR delivers up to 2 Mb/s signals to consumers.

The beauty of the business is that ENMR ships the modems to the customers, who do self-installation. “It's a modem with an antenna built in with five lights on top to indicate signal strength,” Vaughn said. “The consumer can determine the strongest signal by watching the lights and place the modem there. There are no truck rolls for us, so it's very low cost.”