Empire Telephone Selects Pannaway for Converged Broadband Services

By TED GLANZER
TMCnet Communications and Broadband Columnist

Broadband service provider Pannaway Technologies, Inc. continues to make impressive strides in the rural telco market, what with today's announcement that it signed an agreement with independent operating carrier (IOC) Empire Telephone Corp. of Prattsburgh, N.Y. , for the delivery of next-generation broadband services. 

Empire Telephone, according to a press release, supports 8,400 access lines, covering 320 square miles of service territory in western New York .

According to the release, Empire Telephone, which is Pannaway's first customer located in New York State , will utilize Pannaway's Service Convergence Network (SCN) to deploy video services, high speed data and, in 2006, digitized voice with advanced calling features to its customer base.

The SCN "will enable Empire Telephone to provide affordable bundled broadband services that will rival packages offered by local cable and satellite providers," the press release states.

Dale Allaire, Pannaway's marketing director, told TMCnet in an interview today that Empire Telephone approached Pannaway with "a clear, cohesive plan" with regard to offering Triple Play services.

Indeed, according to the release, Empire Telephone selected Pannaway's access solution "based on its ability to deliver a pure IP packet-based transport infrastructure."

Another reason Empire Telephone selected Pannaway was it "support for Session-Initiation Protocol (SIP), which will enable Empire to differentiate its voice offering with advanced calling features."

"We looked very closely at a number of leading access providers and we determined that Pannaway had the most complete solution to help us build a next-generation network for our loyal subscribers," said Empire Telephone's Joseph Gottwald in a prepared statement.  "The Pannaway solution delivers a handful of unique capabilities that we believe will be crucial as we continue to support emerging applications like HDTV and VoD.  Theses features include distributed routing, which will improve our IP video QOS and bandwidth utilization, and Ring Trip Resolution, which eliminates ring voltage from the ADSL2+ line, yielding up to an 8db SNR improvement while increasing signal distance and the number of video streams that we can deliver at home."

The Empire Telephone agreement is but one of a string of announcements that have come out of Pannaway recently.

"We're doing pretty well," Allaire told TMCnet.  Indeed, Allair said that Pannaway expects to release five more customer announcements in the upcoming weeks.

"It's always an honor to be recognized as the partner of choice in the competitive field of broadband service providers, and we are thrilled to have been selected by Empire Telephone for this significant project," said David Meyer, executive vice president of sales at Pannaway, in a prepared statement.  "We are 100 [percent] committed to providing our rural Independent Operating Carriers with the industry's most scalable access solution along with a level of personalized support that is unprecedented in this industry." 

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Ted Glanzer is assistant editor for TMCnet. For more articles by Ted Glanzer , please visit:
http://www.tmcnet.com/tmcnet/columnists/columnist.aspx?id=100033&nm=Ted%20Glanzer

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