How One Rural Telco is Turning Emergency Services into a Differentiator

Most people don’t know they’re one fiber backhoe cut or wind storm away from losing access to 911 emergency services. But a little telco called Northwest Communications Cooperative (NCC) has invested in a remote switching solution aimed at preventing such outages. And it’s emphasizing this reliability in promoting its services.

“With Northwest, they’ve taken the approach that their customer is their most valuable asset,” and they will focus their messaging around that to differentiate themselves in the market place, said Steven Bruny, CEO of Aztek Networks, which NCC has tapped to provide its Emergency Stand Alone (ESA) system.

NCC provides voice, high-speed Internet and cable TV to nearly 6,000 residential and business customers in northwestern North Dakota. To bring a higher level of resiliency to the voice aspect of its services, NCC last month installed 10 Aztek 5000S ESA systems in central office cabinets throughout its region. In the case of NCC, the 5000Ss are working in concert with 1000 Multiservice Access Series (MSAS) units from Tellabs.

Bruny said rural telcos like NCC are turning to ESA solutions to ensure their subscribers have the same level of reliability and access to emergency services as subscribers connected to a traditional host or remote switch. The Aztek ESA products also address service providers’ desires to replace older remote switches, like DMS-10s from Nortel, with products that are lower-cost, smaller, more power efficient, and easier to manage and maintain, Bruny said. More service providers are looking to replace their original remote switches, which are aging and may not be supported by vendors anymore, and want to collapse their switching networks and costs as landline revenues shrink, he added.

Aztek, which got its start 20 years ago as an outsourcing engineering firm for the big telecom equipment providers, came out with its first ESA product, the 5000S, last July, said Bruny. There are currently 50 service provider installations of the 5000S. Earlier this year Aztek brought to market a lower-cost unit, aimed a very small communities, called the 5000SL. And the company intends to add an IP-based solution, the 5000I, to its ESA family of products in April. The Aztek 5000 series products range in price from $10,000 to $25,000.

While vendors including Occam Networks and Pannaway Networks offer ESA functionality as a blade in their broadband loop carrier (BLC) products, Bruny said such solutions address the gear coming into their BLC only rather than the network as a whole. However, the Aztek solution can interface with and ESA-enable any BLC or digital loop carrier (DLC) from any vendor, he said, and it can take multiple such products from one or various vendors and address that group of gear from a single field cabinet.

Aztek has already forged partnerships with some of the leading BLC and DLC vendors, Bruny said, adding that it uses partners to sell into the tier 3 service provider market, does joint called on tier 2 providers and sells directly to tier 1 carrier accounts. For example, both ADTRAN Inc. and Calix resell the Aztek products, he said. Aztek and Tellabs have done interoperability and cosell their products. Aztek has also done integration testing with Alcatel Lightspan.

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