Marcatel

Marcatel is a Mexican Telecommunications Provider that covers 150 cities in Mexico. Marcatel has a 5,000 Km. network of high capacity fiber in Mexico and a global network that interconnects Argentina, Brasil, Canada, Colombia, Chile, China, Spain, the United States of America, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Market Focus:

Marcatel provides local and long distance telephony services to residential users, as well as prepaid phone cards for local and long distance calling.

For businesses, Marcatel provides Internet access services, 800 free-phone services, prepaid long distance phone cards, global coverage post-paid phone cards, virtual private networks and IP PBX services.

What’s New:

Expanding on their successful history of Local, Long Distance and Internet services, the company began consolidating the existing TDM network into a next generation, converged, IP-b Based network using Ribbon’s C3 Gateway Controller, G2 and G9 media gateways and Session Border Controller. The solution provides the same level of functionality at a fraction of the cost of TDM and at the same time prepares them to provide new services and expand their market.

Why They Chose Ribbon:

Ribbon had been part of Marcatel network for 5 years when a proposal for a new project was started to modernize their entire network with the C3 Gateway Controller, G9 and G2 Gateways and the Session Border Controller. After 9 months, Marcatel moved from trial to the deployment of G2 and G9 media gateways (depending on the size required) in all their Points-of-Presence (PoPs) controlled by the C3 controller.

For Marcatel, one of the main advantages of Ribbon’s solution is that it can scale from very small to very large capacities with a simple and compact product portfolio. But the main decisive factor was the construction of a relationship based on trust and the tranquillity of knowing that they had selected a provider that was going to be with them hand in hand over the long run.

Why They Chose C3, G2, G9 and SBC:

Marcatel’s objective was to simplify their network, optimize the transport and energy costs and at the same time prepare their network for future traffic and new services, in particular, IP-to-IP interconnection. Ribbon’s VoIP solution allows Marcatel to achieve that goal by providing the flexibility to replace the local TDM switches with media gateways (G2 or G9 depending on size), centralize call control from a call server (C3) and provide secure and reliable IP-to-IP interconnection by means of a session border controller, benefiting from a full set of trunking features to interconnect to local and international points of presence.

Business Case / Deployment Benefits:

Marcatel had a big TDM switch in each and every city where they provided service. The goal was to replace the TDM switches with gateways and a centralized gateway controller to drastically reduce costs. In Andres Cordovez’s (Marcatel’s Chief Operations Officer) own words: “if you compare that with the footprint that one of these solutions from Ribbon requires, if you put some numbers to that… energy savings, in terms of air conditioning, power, it is by itself the business case”.

Customer Benefits:

In addition to a comprehensive set of consumer and business services as well as interconnection services using the C3 and G2/G9 softswitching solution, Marcatel has now the latest generation of scalable SBCs that enable it to offer its customers with a full set of secure, direct IP-to-IP access and core interconnection services like SIP trunking and Carrier VoIP Peering.