Innovative products, customers not enough to save Tollbridge

An innovative product line, a list of customers that included Comcast Cable and partnerships with some top-line vendors couldn’t save Tollbridge Technologies from the hangman’s noose. The Santa Clara.-based voice-over-broadband vendor shuttered its doors last week after a final effort to raise funds came up short.

This, despite a partnership with a major vendor – Arris – and a promising technology as part of Comcast’s Detroit VoIP telephony trial.

“We were very close to closing a round of funding and that didn’t happen so we have to cease operations,” said Kevin Woods, Tollbridge’s marketing vice president. “We’re trying to see if somebody will buy the company or somehow will meet the funds to continue operations, [but] it doesn’t appear likely that any of those things will happen at this time.”

Tollbridge’s fate mirrors economic irony. Only a few years ago a company with customers and a promising product would have drawn money like puddles draw mosquitoes. Today’s much different.

“We were pretty much the only ones that seriously made this kind of product” – an IP packet technology that employed CableLabs’ DOCSIS and PacketCable specifications to replace traditional constant bit rate to connect telephones to a cable headend, Wood said. Comcast was using Tollbridge’s gear to provide the IP-to-circuit switched interface to a traditional Class 5 telephone switch.

“There are other companies that claim to do it or say they’re going to be getting into it, but I don’t know where their products stand,” Wood said.

Tollbridge, no doubt, was also hammered by general uneasiness about the entire cable industry in the wake of Adelphia Communications ongoing financial implosion. That certainly had to mean something when moneylenders offered a deaf ear to the company’s plea for funds.

“A couple of our major customers were involved in the investment round, and they gave it the best shot to make it work and to make the investment round close,” Woods said. “But it didn’t happen.”