ViaGate ready to make its mark on Tennessee, rest of South

Multimedia access equipment supplier ViaGate Technologies has strengthened its co-marketing relationship with broadband content provider CompleteTV as a precursor to a concerted push of VDSL-delivered voice, video and data services in Tennessee and other Southern states.

The two companies have been trialing the technology with DeKalb Telephone Cooperative (DTC) in Alexandria, Tenn.

“Now we’re going to try to leverage that with around 15 or so of the other independents in the Iris network and bring the whole solution to the table,” said Keith Wymbs, ViaGate’s business development vice president. “We’re going to talk to the other independents in the third quarter … and start deploying it probably in 2002.”

The Iris Network is a group of independent operating companies (IOCs) who have built an OC-48 SONET ring in Tennessee. That ring then connects to other independents in neighboring states like Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Kentucky.

ViaGate provides a multimedia access switch, a customer-premise modem and third-party-sourced TV set-top boxes. Complete TV delivers the headend and the content that is aggregated and stored there.

“We’re saying to these telcos that they have to go from voice and data to video to be able to have the complete solution” to compete with cable providers who are going in the direction from video to data to voice, Wymbs said.

Tennessee is a logical starting place for a merged solution that includes a heavy dose of content, he said.

“From a content standpoint, it’s actually No. 3 in the U.S.; you have L.A., New York and Nashville,” he said.

End users know how to use the technology, he added.

“They love it for all types of things, like NASCAR racing,” he said. “They’re able to watch it on the TV, watch in-car videos on their PC--the streaming portion of it--so they can see the driver’s perspective in multiple cars.”