Wholesale catering to cable

The year 2006 isn’t a likely date for a telecom wholesale startup, but by focusing on one specific market – small cable companies – SinglePipe Communications has carved a successful niche for itself.

The venture capital-based SinglePipe, based in Louisville, Ky., is a competitive local exchange carrier serving tier 2 and tier 3 cable operators that want to offer voice/VoIP services but were struggling with the technology.

“That’s our focus and we have a complete managed service model,” said CEO Matt Phillips, whose telecom background includes work at Level 3 Communications. “We are a CLEC. We provide our own local connectivity coupled with a Broadsoft platform and a backoffice system that allows us to integrate with cable operators’ billing and provisioning systems to enable them to offer both residential service and a full line of business products.”

SinglePipe’s largest customers to date are Northland Cable, which operates cable systems in smaller markets in smaller-market cable systems in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Washington, California and Idaho, and CMA Communications in Dallas, which manages 200 cable companies. SinglePipe also is attracting interest in the broadband wireless space as well, Phillips said.

“Our customers are looking for managed voice products and other products they don’t have the scale to do, like search and portal development,” Phillips said. “Being able to provide add-on IP services – search being one -- is important to our customers. We look at being able t o aggregate our cable customer base, go to search companies and do a portal. We can look at mobile convergence.”

SinglePipe teamed up with Great Lakes Data Systems to create an integrated flow-through billing system for CMA, but also works with other integrators or even with home-grown billing systems, Phillips said. “There are certain groups out there doing cable billing or cable modem provisioning and IP provisioning for the cable,” Phillips said. “We have partnered with a lot of those customers so we can integrate into their systems. We also will work with home-grown systems – we can adapt or modify our APIs.

Phillips concedes this wholesale niche “is finite in size” and also competitive. Companies such as Big River Telephone and other larger wholesalers are also targeting the cable market.