Yukon Telephone Company Inc. in Whittier, Alaska is as unlikely a VoIP trailblazer as one would expect to find anywhere. This family-run independent telephone company, with nine employees, serves about 1,100 customers clustered in and around the small rural towns of Nenana, Ruby, Tanana, Tynoek and Whittier.

Three years ago, Yukon Telephone was faced with a challenge that led it to embrace what was then the very embryonic technology of VoIP.

The telco needed to replace its existing and aging Mitel and Redcom TDM Class 5 switches--but couldn't spend a fortune on replacement gear. It wanted the new technology to provide cost-effective VoIP over various transports and to integrate with its legacy network. Yukon selected the MetaSwitch VP3500 from MetaSwitch, a division of London-based Data Connection Ltd., a leading provider of communications protocol software.

The VP3500 provides both legacy and broadband interfaces, including GR-303, VoATM and VoIP, as well as advanced Web-based subscriber services.

"The VP3500 is the leading broadband-enabled Class 5 Switch in North America," says Andy Randall, vice president of marketing, MetaSwitch. "Our switch enables service providers to simultaneously serve customers in multiple calling areas with more than 80 Class 5 features and services." Randall says the switch is very easy to deploy and scales from 400 to more than 250,000 subscribers in a single rack.

For Yukon Telephone, the challenge was to provide competitive but affordable telecom services. "I wanted rural Alaska to have the best telecommunications services possible at affordable prices," says Don Eller, general manager of Yukon Telephone. The company's commitment to providing telephone service dates back to 1960, when it turned on service in Tanana, making the town one of the first in Alaska served by a local telephone carrier.

UNCERTAIN FUNDING

Eller says the uncertainty of federal funding for rural telcos forced him to look at rationalizing Yukon's operation with next-generation equipment that he hoped would enable the company to remain cost-effective, deliver new services and expand its coverage area.

Yukon selected the MetaSwitch VP 3500 after receiving the results of an independent evaluation of next-generation Class 5 switches it commissioned along with nine other Alaska telcos.

The evaluation to determine whether the switches were suitable for deployment in rural Alaska was done by Reeve Engineers in Anchorage. Reeve spent six months doing a side-by-side comparison of switches from four vendors: CopperCom, Gluon, MetaSwitch and Taqua. The evaluation involved installing all the switches in the Reeve Engineers' laboratory and connecting them to systems inside and outside the lab with SS7 and CAS trunks. Reeve looked at a full range of legacy capabilities, as well as the switches' support for packet voice.

Yukon deployed the MetaSwitch technology in Whittier in June 2003 after an installation that took less than two weeks. The deployment included both TDM and VoIP interfaces to make the most cost-effective use of existing DLC and switching equipment. "During the trial, customers were smoothly transitioned from Yukon Telephone's existing legacy Class 5 switch without service disruption or switch outages," says Randall.

"Gradually, we introduced broadband loop carriers (from Occam Networks) and VoIP service over cable, 802.11 wireless and satellite," adds Eller. "We tested the switch over every transport medium available, and it performed well on everything. We saw in the switch the realization of the much-hyped notion of convergence of technology. The switch enables us to bring high-speed broadband voice, data and video to our customers at a very affordable price and cost to us."

Currently, customers pay $50 per month for broadband, $35 for basic cable and $40 per month for flat-rate calling anywhere in the United States.

Yukon Telephone paid about $200,000 for the switch, says Randall. "Generally, our switches cost one-fifth the cost of legacy switches, depending on the applications and installation involved," he says. Eller notes that the switch's packet-based capability has significantly lowered Yukon's transport costs.

As a result of the successful deployment, which served as a trial site for the USDA Rural Utilities Service (RUS), MetaSwitch was listed as a RUS-approved vendor in March 2004. Occam Networks was also listed, giving the green light to other rural carriers to follow Yukon's lead and migrate to an all-IP network using federal government RUS funds. Among the carriers that followed Yukon's lead in using the VP 3500 switch were 150 independent telephone companies in Iowa, members of the Iowa Network Services (INS), who can provide packet-based voice services to more than 560,000 Iowans in 330 communities.

"Back in 2003, we saw VoIP as both an opportunity, but also a huge jump for a small company," says Eller. "Our experience from the 'other side' of that jump has been uniformly positive and should encourage other service providers to take the plunge. We have found the technology to be extremely easy to deploy, at least as reliable as legacy equipment, but far more flexible.We have squeezed multiple bays of legacy Class 5 switching into a third of a rack and have entirely replaced a complex circuit-switched access architecture with a simple Ethernet switch."