May 17, 2007

The Optimum Way to Deliver Voice

By Jim Barthold

Arguably the pioneer in the cable commercial space - Cablevision Systems broadband business communications arm Optimum Lightpath - has stepped onto the edge again by launching managed voice-over-metro-Ethernet (VOME, anyone?) service for its commercial customers in the metro New York, Connecticut and Northern New Jersey markets.

Optimum Lightpath aims to deliver reliable IP voice service over the same end-to-end network to reassure companies that are looking to move to IP but worry about network quality and reliability.

"Because it's Ethernet all the way, we don't have to worry about what happens when it gets handed off to a disparate protocol," said Troy Glick, Optimum Lightpath's vice president of product development. "We're not doing anything over SONET; we're not doing copper in the last mile; we're not using certain things that could degrade the service or give us the inability to have the visibility that we need to control the packets. It's fully fiber from the customer premises all the way out."

Optimum Lightpath is working with Cisco Systems, which assumes responsibility of the end-to-end equipment - including on-premises IP phones - and NEC, which handles management and monitoring. The managed VOME service goes beyond Optimum Lightpath's traditional fiber-based data networking for commercial customers.

"This is purely a voice service. We've been in the voice business for 18 years ... doing TDM voice through circuit emulation, and we've switched over to metro Ethernet. This is moving the demark inside the customer premises as well as seriously looking at the value proposition of IP communications," Glick said.

- Jim Barthold