Blackfoot Telecommunications Group makes the big shift

Montana is known for its beautiful mountain vistas, its massive state parks and its rugged individualism. Here, the Blackfoot Telecommunications Group http://www.blackfoot.com is living up to the reputation of its hometown, Missoula, a once-distant outpost that sent the first Congresswoman to Washington — 30 years before women were given the right to vote.

The parent company of Blackfoot Telephone Cooperative, founded in 1954, also is proving that it’s ahead of its time in moving to an optical Ethernet backbone network, even though it meant installing fiber deep into a service territory that covers 22 exchanges outside Missoula and includes 17,000 access lines spread over 6500 miles of mountains and canyons.

Blackfoot officials started talking about moving away from its traditional ATM/TDM infrastructure about three years ago, about the same time that such discussions were heating up at telcos nationwide. The difference in Blackfoot’s case is that the talking was quickly translated into action. Last year, the company began swapping out its Nortel remote TDM switches and replacing them with a MetaSwitch softswitch and Occam Networks’ IP-based BLC 6000 System broadband loop carrier systems. Thus far, nine remote switches have been replaced in a systematic transformation of this rural network.

The transformation happened not only because it’s a new technology but because the economic environment for rural telcos is changing in a significant way.

By Carol Wilson

Full Story: http://telephonyonline.com/mag/telecom_blackfoot_makes_big/

(Many thanks to Rob Ferris for passing this along. All the best Rob. Russ)