Clearcable Leverages Sangoma to Serve Ontario Cable Operators

"Clearcable needed to be very cautious about the hardware that they selected, so they could keep the costs low, but still build a reliable solution. And considering their target customer — smaller cable operators looking to add voice — they needed a small scale solution that would be flexible enough to grow as the carriers grew."

By Greg Galitzine
Group Editorial Director, TMCnet.com

First appeared on April 17, 2008, on http://opensourcepbx.tmcnet.com

Small Cable Operators are particularly motivated to offer voice services as part of their communications and entertainment bundles to residential and business subscribers. They need to be able to offer service similar in nature to those provided by much larger cable operators, but they are prohibited from entering the market because of the high cost of traditional switching infrastructure.

And, in order for these smaller operators to remain competitive when competing with the likes of Comcast (News – Alert) and Time Warner Cable, they need voice platforms that can offer the following benefits:

• "Micro–calability" — scale down to 100 lines
• Cost–efficiency — low entry point
• Flexibility, offering full feature functionality
• Self–contained — no need for external devices
• Ease of integration with carriers; and
• High levels of reliability.

Clearcable Networks set out to address this market by establishing the "Nomad" Architecture as a Service Provider Asterisk (News – Alert) implementation leveraging Sangoma hardware.

Clearcable is a consulting engineering company that makes its living by helping small cable system operators launch voice solutions. The group exists primarily to help them get their product together, and get it launched and deployed.

According to Rob McCann, president of Clearcable Networks, "The Comcasts and the Time Warners in the market have big engineering departments, but a lot of the smaller cable systems don't have those resources."

"They still need to deliver the same products and services so they can continue to be competitive, but they don't generally have the engineering prowess or staffing to do that."

TMCnet asked McCann to describe the genesis of the Nomad architecture.

Said McCann, "In 2004 we set out to make a very small–scale embedded system with no moving parts, that could serve as the call management server, themedia gateway, the feature server and the voicemail server — all in a single rack unit. Our goal was to have a little switch that was capable of scaling down to as little as a hundred customers, and the only way to do that is to leverage open source."

McCann stressed the fact that Clearcable needed to be very cautious about the hardware that they selected, so they could keep the costs low, but still build a reliable solution. And considering their target customer — smaller cable operators looking to add voice — they needed a small scale solution that would be flexible enough to grow as the carriers grew.

"Our notion was that we would do it in one rack unit, with no moving parts; it would be highly reliable, and if they wanted redundancy, they could just put in another rack unit," said McCann. "To do that we needed a media gateway interface to do our conversion fromIP to TDM, and that's really where Sangoma came in."

McCann had nothing but praise for Sangoma's offerings.

"The primary advantages of the Sangoma product include integrated echo cancellation which was something we didn't see available from any of the competitors at that particular time, and the ability to scale down for us. We found that some of the competitors were very processor intensive and we wanted to build such a small–scale system we had to conserve on memory and on interrupts on processor... and again that's where Sangoma shines."

"All of our testing demonstrated that hands–down they had the far superior product."

Clearcable deploys a variety of Sangoma cards as part of their solution, leveraging the A101D, the A102D and the A104D cards.

The A102D is a two–port PRI card that connects up to the PSTN using two PRIs, which results in 46 channels of connectivity to the PSTN. By oversubscribing the system by a ratio of 10:1, Clearcable is able to service almost 500 subscribers on a single card.

The cards include onboard echo cancellation, and perform all of the media gateway functions, which allows the operators to move any IP–based traffic off the cable network and onto the PSTN.

The A101 is a one–PRI version, which Clearcable uses in either really small scale markets or as testing and demonstration.

And, the A104D is a four–port module (4 PRIs) that provides the highest density solution.

McCann was blunt about Clearcable's early challenges as well as the challenges of using open source in a service provider implementation.

"It really took us a long time to settle on hardware and software and to harden the solution so that it was a service provider type implementation. If you're familiar with Asterisk, you know it's far from service provider — open source code isn't built to work that way. We had to do a fair amount of work to refine that, but also to work through integration of the Sangoma product. The Sangoma team made it really easy because they helped out a lot. Their support is outstanding."

McCann reiterated that Clearcable was very concerned with the reliability that they would be able to achieve with a solution built on open source.

"That [reliability] was important for us in a service provider environment. We wanted to make sure that the stuff that we put out there wasn't going to break down on a regular basis. That high level of reliability and that high level of support and technological advantages were the winners for us."

Clearcable has been earning a good reputation in the Canadian province of Ontario, helping the smaller cable operators there compete with their larger rivals. The largest production cable customer currently using the Nomad platform serves 1,000 customers. And McCann says they're in the process of working with a customer to service a 4,000 subscriber deployment.

By leveraging the Clearcable solution empowered by Sangoma, small cable operators like Mountain Cable of Hamilton, Bluewater TV Cable of Clinton, and Cable Cable of Fenelon Falls, are able to effectively compete for Small Enterprise commercial voice services. They can even enter the residential voice services market.

At the end of the day, broadband and telephony service providers of all types can take advantage of Clearcable's specifically designed Nomad solution and broad expertise to launch new revenue generating services.

Greg Galitzine is editorial director of TMCnet. To read more of Greg's articles, please visit his columnist page.