Case Study: DigitalBridge Communications Pioneers Voice Over WiMAX Using Alianzas Hosted Platform
When wireless broadband service provider DigitalBridge Communications (DBC) went looking for the best long-term solution for delivering a broad range of IP telephony and voice applications to its residential and business customers, it found the comprehensive, “future proof” solution offered by Alianza’s hosted VoIP platform to be the perfect match. Alianza’s fully integrated platform provides the voice quality, reliability and flexibility that meet all of DBC’s requirements. By teaming with Alianza, DBC now has a robust, plug-and-play VoIP offering that can scale with its rapidly expanding customer base.
The Challenge
DBC was founded in late 2005 as a broadband service provider for underserved communities of up to 150,000 people. In 2006, DBC began operating a temporary 3.5GHz test license in Muncie, Ind., to test Alvarion WiMAX gear. WiMAX (Worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access) is a secure, high-speed, long-range wireless Internet technology that employs licensed radio frequencies to provide broadband service.
In June 2008, DBC became the first service provider in North America to deliver mobile WiMAX services when it deployed Alvarion’s BreezeMAX 802.16e platform in Jackson Hole, Wy. Today, operating on the 2.5GHz licensed spectrum, DBC has deployed WiMAX networks in 15 cities throughout the Midwest and West.
“WiMAX enables us to quickly and cost-effectively bring the Internet to places that need it most, at broadband speeds,” said P. Kelley Dunne, co-founder and CEO of DBC. “In under a year, we proved we could deliver fast, simple, portable and affordable broadband services that customers want — and do it profitably.”
Since its founding, DBC’s strategy was to leverage the advantages of WiMAX to augment its high-speed data services with value-added applications, beginning with those services that would have the most universal appeal to the customer and the greatest financial impact on DBC. With its WiMAX strategy in place, the next logical step in the company’s evolution was to offer VoIP services and meet stringent requirements for quality, flexibility and pricing. Given DBC’s decision to build its network with Alvarion infrastructure, the company needed a voice solution that would take full advantage of its Quality of Service (QoS) capability.
The Solution
DBC’s management team evaluated four vendors’ platforms. Of four providers considered, Alianza’s Platform was chosen for the following reasons:
1. Manageability and ease of operation: Alianza was the only vendor whose hosted voice platform was built from the ground up. All others were cobbled together using point solutions of multiple third parties. In addition, Alianza’s platform was the only one that was fully integrated, combining the six core components into a single management portal that significantly decreased the learning curve related to managing and supporting the product offering.
2. Flexibility: Alianza’s robust Application Programming Interface (API) gives service providers flexibility to integrate Alianza’s back-office administrative portal into existing service provider OSS & BSS, optimizing back-office operational efficiencies.
3. Performance, stability and SLA: Alianza guarantees 99.99 percent uptime across all mission critical components.
4. End-user features and functionality: Although Alianza provides industry standard feature sets for residential and SMB customers, one area that stood out for DBC was Alianza’s provisioning system. This system enables DBC to pre-provision Alianza-certified CPE so that when the CPE arrives at the customer premise, the installation is plug-and-play with no remote or hands-on support required by DBC.
5. Speed to market: Alianza’s hosted voice platform allowed DBC to launch voice service in a fraction of the time it would have taken to build an in-house solution.
6. Voice/call quality: When compared head-to-head with other vendors, the quality of the voice calls on Alianza’s network was noticeably superior..
7. Pricing model: Alianza’s pricing model is based on fixed monthly fees per line/extension that are deployed. This enabled DBC to commercialize voice services without investing any up-front capital expenditures. Alianza’s aggressive pricing structure is reflective of the fact that there are no built-in licensing fees for third-party components, as is the case with other competitors.
CEO Dunne was impressed. “Alianza stood out. Other VoIP providers were retro-fitting their premise-based offerings as hosted solutions. We felt this would compromise quality and long-term scalability. Alianza’s overall approach to partnership was also outstanding. Our goals are aggressive, and we need a partner who will be responsive and grow with us.”
Many different network applications need to work together to ensure that a VoIP call is handled and billed correctly from beginning to end. Alianza’s core platform components are unified into a single interface. An administrator inputs data once and it is automatically propagated to all the necessary modules and processes.
The Result
Alianza’s hosted voice platform provides the kind of competitive edge that DBC was looking for without diverting valuable resources from its core competency. Winner of multiple industry awards, the Alianza hosted voice platform features a robust set of applications and an intuitive interface that makes it easy to integrate with legacy systems. It consolidates the entire VoIP services life cycle and all its disparate systems and processes into a single dashboard, with seamless back-office integration and parallel business process optimization.
Doug Smith, CIO of DBC, said, “The Alianza platform simplifies our administrative and operational tasks. Without it, we would have to input data across six separate systems. Now we do it once and the Alianza system does the rest. We were able to deploy quickly and save money and effort while driving increased revenues through our voice applications.”
“WiMAX service providers such as DigitalBridge will grow quickly by offering a wide range of features and applications. They recognize that Alianza’s hosted voice platform allows them to focus on generating revenue instead of managing the expense and operational details of building a voice solution,” said Robert Syputa, Maravedis partner and senior analyst. “Operators’ business models are shifting increasingly to a strategic model of providing a flexible basket of services to a variety of clients. In taking advantage of Alianza’s platform, they can concentrate more on customers’ evolving needs and less on deployment and management of each application. The industry model is toward best of breed network and services providers.”
