The
pioneers of open access - transforming communities and broadband businesses.
Everywhere.
Imagine this.
You turn on your PC or TV at home and bring
up a menu listing the competing TV, phone, movie, internet, gaming, health care
and other services available on your broadband network. You click on the
services you want from the providers of your choice and you get those services
immediately. No waiting. No lengthy installation times. And, due to healthy
competition and the way we designed your broadband network, your overall monthly
costs are much less than what you pay today.
This is what an open access
broadband network powered by PacketFront does for an end user. Our solutions are
transforming communities and broadband businesses around the world
.
Built
on experience
PacketFront was founded in 2001 by the visionaries behind
some of the world’s largest triple-play fiber
networks of the 1990s. Like many pioneering business efforts,
these early initiatives did not go as planned. The manual deployment and
management of multiple services to thousands of broadband users caused
operational expenses to soar. Meanwhile revenues fell as bandwidth pricing began
to commoditize. In short, the technologies and business models that were used
were built for an era of the past.
Changing
an industry paradigm
The technologies and business models of the 1990s were all
about creating, deploying, managing and billing for connections. Through their
experiences in these pioneering efforts, the founders of PacketFront
realized that convergence – that is, the delivery of many services over one
connection – was changing the requirements of the industry. Whether you were
seeking to use broadband to promote local
economic development
or simply trying to maximize profitability,
it was no longer enough to deploy, sell and manage connections quickly and
efficiently. The challenge was now how to innovate, deploy, market and manage
new services as rapidly and efficiently as possible.
Open
access – maximizing service innovation
Let’s say you owned a road and you wanted to maximize the
number of goods and services sold on your road. Which would be the fastest and
most efficient way to do so – close the road to other businesses and invent all
the goods and services yourself or open up the road for use by as many
entrepreneurs as possible? Which way would create the most jobs? Which way would
create the most total wealth? If you answered “open up”,
you are right.
If
an infrastructure is open for others to sell their goods and services over, we
call it Open Access. Regardless of whether it is roads, airports, or broadband
connections, if you want to maximize innovation in services, open access is the
way to go. However, while the technologies and business models to support open
access roads and airports have been around for some time, for broadband that has
not been the case. In fact, at the turn of the millennium, the solutions of the
time couldn’t handle the complexities of efficiently managing the triple play
for one company over one network, never mind support the efficient delivery of
hundreds of services from hundreds of different companies, all over many
different types of connections. The world had neither the business models nor
the technologies needed to support open access broadband networks. They had to
be invented.
Our
solutions
What is fewest number of staff needed to successfully
operate an automated open access network? How does a service provider on an open
access network provide end-user support when they do not own the network? Could
a new service be created, deployed, and marketed in minutes rather than weeks or
months? Could an end user use a web page to select their services from multiple
different companies? Could an end user take their voice service from one
provider and their video from another? Who would pay who? How much? When? How?
Could an end user design their own services on the fly? Could the deployment of
new services be automated over any mix of fiber,
wireless, DSL
, BPL and Coax connections?
What business models best support innovation in local
services?
These
were just a few of the challenges we set out to solve when we invented our open
access solution in 2001. More than
just technology,
we’ve also developed a body of knowledge and an eco-system of partners that gives
our customers access to the best practices in open access around the world. So
whether it is designing the business models and technologies needed to make a triple-play
fiber network profitable, or providing an end-to-end “turnkey” open access
network designed specifically to maximize economic and social development, we’ve built our success on ensuring our customers
achieve their goals.
Award-winning
results
As a result of our approach, today PacketFront is a world
leader in developing, designing, and operating open access fiber
networks. Our customers
include the largest and most successful municipal and utility
fiber networks in the world, as well as property developers, carriers and cable
companies.
Several of these customers have won prestigious industry awards such as “Municipal Area Network of the Year
”,
“Most Advanced Fiber to the Premise Network”, “Best Use of Fiber to Bridge the Digital Divide”, and “FTTH and
FTTB with Most Advanced IP Services”
. The
list keeps growing.
We too have won many awards and accolades
for our
solutions, including the 2006 International Engineering Consortium’s InfoVision Award
for our innovative
approach to creating and managing open access networks.
Our
commitment
But we aren’t done yet. We are committed to continually
driving innovation in technical and business solutions for open access networks.
As the environment changes, we will be one step ahead, helping our customers
take full advantage of the opportunities and avoiding the threats. Because
whether it is technology, economics, or broadband services, we are committed to
turning our
solutions, our knowledge and our relationships into our customers’
ongoing success
. Proven in over a hundred communities around the
world, we are on a mission to open up
the world
of broadband – and empower citizens. Everywhere.
