Blue Ridge Communications (www.blueridgecommunication.com) was formed in the 1940s with an innovative approach to improving television reception in the mountain community of Palmerton, Pennsylvania: It transmitted the television signals over cable, and as such, became a pioneer of cable TV.

Eliminates Costly Leased Lines

Maintaining the spirit of innovation and vision that always characterized the company, Blue Ridge today offers an expanded range of services, which includes digital cable, high speed Internet, paging and pay-per-view. In this same spirit, Blue Ridge selected RAD's IPmux with unique TDM over IP (TDMoIP) technology to improve internal communications between the company's corporate office and its 15 remote cable offices. "The problem was that we were relying on 56 kbps connections via leased line services from a third-party provider," says Barry Fink, PC Network Technician at Blue Ridge. "Not only were we throwing away a significant amount of money on these leased lines, but we also needed more bandwidth to allow the voice and data to share the network with a very high degree of quality."

Rather than install costly T1 fiber lines, Blue Ridge opted to use RAD's IPmux-16 and IPmux-1 TDMoIP gateways, which would provide transparent T1 circuits over the existing data network. A successful trial was conducted with the help of Source Communications Group (www.scg-nj.com), a Mt. Laurel, New Jersey-based value-added reseller of RAD solutions.

Higher Quality Voice at Lower Cost

With RAD's TDMoIP solution in place, Blue Ridge enjoys numerous improvements over the previous setup. Because the IPmux units communicate over the existing Ethernet network, the need for costly leased lines no longer exists. Furthermore, the higher speed Ethernet/fiber connection eliminates the need for compression, resulting in greatly improved voice quality. In addition, TDMoIP is transparent to protocols and signaling, enabling Blue Ridge to take full advantage of their Nortel Meridian 1 system and provide communications services to multiple remote facilities.

Unified Network

Now all users at the head office and at remote sites can share common network features and functionalities within a unified private communications network. "PBX features like voicemail can now be used by the remote locations. To the user, it appears that remote office telephones are now simply extensions off of the main PBX," explains Fink. This capability is normally offered by the Meridian system over T1 or dark fiber links, but RAD's IPmux extends this capability to work seamlessly over Ethernet networks. "Blue Ridge plans to roll out the TDMoIP solution to up to 10 more remote sites as we continue to add fiber connections," continues Fink.

"This simple TDMoIP solution saved Blue Ridge from having to maintain a separate TDM-based network and incur the costs of TDM switching equipment at each office. There was no other cost other than having to buy the IPmux for each end," adds Joe Murphy, Division President at Source.

Innovative Cable Company Uses IPmux to Extend T1 Circuits over Switched Ethernet

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