GigaOM

Three members of the Midwest Tel Net consortium - Hillsboro Telephone Company, LaValle Telephone Cooperative and Richland-Grant Telephone Cooperative, are going triple play and will use gear from Santa Barbara-based Occam Networks to deliver voice, video and high-speed data to the companies’ rural residential and small business subscribers. All three telecos are based in Southern Wisconsin. “The independent carriers continue to be very aggressive about delivering triple play services,” said Russ Sharer, vice president of marketing and business development for Occam Networks, which makes Broadband Loop Carrier networking equipment that enable telephone companies to deliver voice, data and video services. Occam’s products are based on Ethernet and Internet Protocol (IP) technologies. The company has been quite successful in selling into the independent telecom and rural broadband markets and as a result has been able to raise $20.7 million since November 2003.