Calix announced that Telecom Management Services (TMS), a growing consortium of telecommunications companies in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, has selected the Calix Unified Access portfolio as its preferred access system for future projects across its expanding footprint.

TMS plans to act as a catalyst to advanced broadband service deployments among telecommunications companies by combining its expertise in enabling and managing services like IPTV with the aggregate scale of its partner members.

Southwest Tennessee communications service provider Millington Telephone Company and Cable TV (Millington) is the latest company in the region to join the growing consortium, which now includes members which in aggregate represent nearly 100,000 access lines.

Calix will provide any TMS member company with additional advantages, such as volume pricing and unified systems, operations, management, and support model.

The combination of the TMS companies with Calix advanced services expertise is expected to result in economies of scale and scope that would have been impossible had each company acted alone.

“We believe that the best way for telecom companies to successfully deliver advanced broadband services is to band together and leverage common fixed costs, infrastructure, expertise, and synergies,” said Trevor Bonnstetter, CEO of West Kentucky and Tennessee Telecommunications Cooperative (WK&T).

“The scale and resources required for advanced solutions like IPTV are extraordinarily challenging for a telecom company who goes it alone. On the other hand, the benefits of working together are substantial from both a business case and an operational perspective,” Bonnstetter.

TMS, which is currently composed of WK&T, Ben Lomand Telephone Cooperative, Ardmore Telephone Company, and now Millington, was formed to provide management, organization, and broad-range oversight services to telecom cooperatives and companies in the Southeast region of the U.S.

TMS members enjoy a variety of benefits that can significantly reduce the capital and operational resources necessary to provide a variety of advanced broadband services, including leveraging a common MPEG4 headend and network operations center (NOC).

By standardizing on the Calix Unified Access portfolio, TMS will further simplify such challenges as training and  maintaining an inventory of spare parts, while also leveraging the Calix Management System (CMS) for common management and provisioning, and Compass Flow Analyzer for network traffic analysis and services insight.

“When TMS was formed in 2009, we had a vision of not only providing new business opportunities for the original member cooperatives, but of bringing advanced broadband services to the entire region,” said Levoy Knowles,  chairman, TMS.

As the TMS consortium has grown to include additional cooperatives and other telecom companies, as well as to form key relationships with industry leaders like Calix, the benefits of membership have become even more compelling.

While TMS member companies expect to gain powerful operational and business efficiencies from their involvement with the consortium, the real winners of this initiative are going to be the subscribers to TMS-enabled services offered by each of these companies, who will benefit from a superior broadband consumer experience.

By Telecomlead.com Team
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