MetaSwitch lands Cable & Wireless

MetaSwitch has landed its first major customer in the company’s efforts to replicate its North American success in other markets. Cable & Wireless International has completed deployment of a MetaSwitch VP2510 Integrated Softswitch in Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean that is a United Kingdom territory and the site of a U.S. military base.

MetaSwitch expects CWI to deploy more of its gear elsewhere in the network, which covers 150 countries, as it retires older switches, under a broad agreement between the two companies.

“I think they will be an important reference customer for us,” said Ben Miller, vice president of sales for the EMEA market. “But there are amazing possibilities within C&W itself – it had a huge base of switches. Each market is quite independent. They like that MetaSwitch can be a high-end device or a low-end device depending on the scale of the geography.”

The switch supports both traditional telephony and voice-over-IP, enabling the service provider to make the transition to converged voice and data and more efficient operations, he added.

The Diego Garcia facility will serving approximately 2,000 residents, supporting a combination of E1 and T1 traffic, and will route off-island traffic through satellite connections.

As MetaSwitch continues its global push, the company is looking for other EMEA markets in which its gear will play well, including developing markets, Miller said.