Eastex Telephone Coop., one of the largest rural carriers in Texas, said that it’s upgrading its network with Carrier VoIP Services from
Nortel.
With the help of carrier VoIP infrastructure, Eastex expects to provide carrier-grade voice and multimedia services to its more than 34,000 residential and business subscribers across rural East Texas.
“Nortel (
News -
Alert) continues to meet our needs and provide the level of service essential to our success,” said Rusty Dorman, assistant general manager at Eastex, in a release.
Giving an example, he said that when a recent rain storm caused a tree to come crashing through company’s switching facility that interrupted service, adding that Nortel’s technicians were “quickly” on-site to manually dry each circuit pack and bring the telephone exchange back up and working before nightfall.
“After working with Nortel for our infrastructure needs for nearly 30 years, I couldn't pick a better partner to work with as we move to the next phase of our network evolution,” said Dorman.
Eastex plans to upgrade its legacy DMS switches using Nortel’s Communication Server (CS) 1500 softswitch. Company officials said that this will allows them to offer new communication services such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), Centrex IP business services and next-generation multimedia communications.
A next-generation carrier VoIP softswitch, Nortel's CS 1500 Softswitch provides a “powerful platform” for IP communication services. Recently, company introduced new product enhancements to the CS 1500.
Nortel officials said that the enhancements allow service providers to offer new revenue generating applications like unified messaging, single number service, subscriber web portal, and on-demand conferencing.
With the CS 1500, service providers can re-use existing equipment and offer cost-effective evolution for existing Nortel DMS-10 and DMS-100 switches and also other technologies widely installed in current carrier telephone systems such as DCO and EWSD switches.
Samih Elhage, president for carrier VoIP and application solutions at Nortel said that Nortel's CS 1500 softswitch allows regional service providers like Eastex to leverage their existing infrastructure investments to meet customer needs.
In addition, it also provides a foundation that will allow them to launch advanced services, such as single number service, unified messaging and integrated web portal with click-to-call, said Elhage.
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by
Patrick Barnard
