October 18, 2007

When it Comes to Commercial Voice, Bresnan's on SMB Target

By Jim Barthold

Billings, Bozeman and Missoula, MT; Grand Junction, CO; Casper and Cheyenne, WY.

These six cities hardly conjure up visions of 57-floor office towers where the corporate lords can sit on the top floors and survey their sports and media fiefdoms and the serfs who make it all possible. On the other hand, these sound exactly like the kinds of markets you'd want to target if you were a cable operator with a small-medium business (SMB) voice offering.

"Over 70 percent of the businesses in those cities are 10 employees or fewer. The real majority of potential customers are small-medium businesses," said Steve Cruce, marketing director-commercial services, at Bresnan Communications, which is targeting those six markets as the frontrunners for a commercial services offering.

Bresnan has deployed is own switching platform and technology specific to commercial customers using a MetaSwitch class 4/5 traditional central office switch as a platform distinct from what it's doing with a residential voice service and dedicates a portion of its cable network aside from the residential play.

Different points

"One of the things that we liked about MetaSwitch as a technology platform is that it supports different end points and different technologies," said Cruce. "We can deploy an analog TDM-based telephone voice service, and we can also deploy an IP voice service and support IP end points. We can use fiber, hybrid fiber/coax (or) copper loops."

Logically, of course, the MSO is using its HFC plant for the commercial services, dedicating a CMTS and using a variety of cable modems that run between four and 12 telco VoIP lines. It's also contracted with Primal Solutions to handle its billing and rating engine for calls.

"The moment they provision a customer, we get that data from them, who's being provisioned with commercial services, and as soon as they make a phone call that hits the switch, we get their records off the switch," said Mark DiCamillo, vice president of marketing and product management at Primal Solutions.

The information is then placed into Primal's data repository and correlated with information received from Bresnan's billing systems. Primal then generates a bill, which is a little trickier than compiling the bill for a month's HBO service. It's even a little trickier than counting minutes, said DiCamillo.

"The billing can become much more complicated from a user's standpoint and the views of the usage and the views of the billing," he said. "A lawyer's office or an accountant's office will typically charge their clients for telephony," and those charges have to be compiled and broken out, he said.

That, said Cruce, is why Bresnan hands off those responsibilities to companies like Primal. Bresnan is more interested in selling services to a group of customers who are "pretty much underserved (because) the incumbent provider isn't out there on a day-to-day basis, and we are."

Web-based proactivity

That day-to-day contact allows Bresnan to also keep its customers in touch with changes as its product line evolves. Being IP also gives customers the chance to change things on their own via a Web portal, which is a good thing considering that the offering is somewhat open ended.

"We have some stripped down lines with just a few features, and we have a very feature-rich business line that has about 20-plus features rolled into a package," Cruce said. "We're also a long distance provider with a variety of plans and packages, (and) for larger businesses that are typically served with PBXs, we sell primary rate and t12 local access and dedicated long distance plans."

The MSO might at some point add a fixed wireless piece as well, "but that's not anything that's here today," he said.

What's here today is a business voice offering in a market that seems tailor-made for a cable operator's strengths.

- Jim Barthold