GENBAND Equips Hamilton County Communications to Deliver Advanced IP and Fiber-to-the-Home Service

Seattle, WA, July 28, 2010 – Continuing its momentum in the regional carrier space, GENBAND, a leading developer of IP solutions and services, today announced that Hamilton County Communications, a subsidiary of Hamilton County Telephone Cooperative in Dahlgren, Illinois, is leveraging GENBAND’s industry-leading C15™ Compact Softswitch to deliver advanced IP services to end users and lay the groundwork for Hamilton’s Fiber-to-the Home (FTTH) roll-out to seven exchanges that includes Hamilton County and five other adjacent counties in Southern Illinois.

GENBAND’s C15 second-generation carrier VoIP softswitch plays a significant role in Hamilton County’s network modernization plans. The C15 equips Hamilton to offer one of the most extensive suites of advanced services, including Hosted Business Solutions, SIP PBX Trunking, IP Centrex services and SIP multimedia applications to small and medium size business (SMB) and residential consumers.

“Our goal is to enable rural Illinois subscribers to experience high-quality telecommunication services that you might typically only see in large metropolitan areas,” said Kevin Pyle, General Manager, Hamilton County Telephone Co-op. “We selected GENBAND and its regional Class 5 C15 solution because we knew they would help us meet that goal and would provide the quality, reliability and feature functionality essential to our network modernization efforts. GENBAND’s solution will also seamlessly interoperate with our existing and planned infrastructure, which is critical to our upcoming FTTH rollout.”

GENBAND’s C15 seamlessly integrates with the service providers’ existing TDM infrastructure, making it affordable for small and medium-sized operators to bring VoIP to their customers. The solution also allows carriers to reuse their existing proprietary peripheral equipment rather than necessitating a full replacement of the entire TDM office.

“GENBAND’s C15 equips innovative carriers like Hamilton to offer a wide range of IP-based communication services without the cost or complexity often associated with this type of network migration,” said Dan Lakey, Senior Vice President of Sales at GENBAND. “Today’s announcement adds to GENBAND’s recent success and momentum in helping small, regional service providers to migrate their existing TDM/legacy networks to IP so that they can deliver more advanced and innovative communication services to subscribers.”

To ensure a seamless implementation of these various new technologies and services, GENBAND is also providing Hamilton with installation, commissioning, project management, training and GENBANDCare technical support services. GENBAND’s Professional Services organization is staffed in North America by nearly 500 highly trained resources that specialize in the engineering, deployment, TDM to IP migration and support of legacy and NGN networks.

GENBAND C15 solution experts are at the OPASTCO tradeshow (booth #27) taking place this week in Seattle. At the show, GENBAND unveiled the new C15 Automated Cutover capability which is an embedded software utility that enables service providers to migrate legacy networks to IP without having to subject their users to a planned network outage during the migration. The GENBAND Automated Cutover capability also allows operators to rollover existing users to the new network, while still utilizing many of the same back office systems and procedures and avoiding risky “flash cutovers”. GENBAND has over 30 years of experience providing dedicated solutions to the regional market and has migrated over 36 million TDM lines to IP with best-of-class speed and accuracy.

According to recent reports from Infonetics, Synergy, and Dell’Oro, GENBAND is the #1 supplier in the global service provider VoIP market which includes softswitches, media gateways, session border controllers, media servers and application servers. In addition, according to Infonetics, GENBAND is the leading carrier IP softswitch supplier in North America, with more than 60% revenue share.

About Hamilton County Telephone Co-op
Hamilton County Telephone Co-op is located in Dahlgren, Illinois. Hamilton County Telephone Co-op provides local and long distance telephone, cellular, voice mail, video, and Internet services. Hamilton’s services is available throughout rural areas of Hamilton County and bordering six counties, and includes the exchanges of Broughton, Belle Prairie, Macedonia, Belle Rive, Blairsville, and Dale.

About GENBAND
GENBAND is a global leader of IP applications, switching and service solutions. The company offers the industry’s most comprehensive, open, standards-based switching portfolio, with products deployed in over 600 customer networks and two-thirds of the world’s marquee service provider networks spanning more than 80 countries. GENBAND is headquartered in Plano, Texas, has legal entities in nearly 50 countries and operates product, sales and service Centers of Excellence globally. To learn more, visit us on the web at www.genband.com.

GENBAND, the GENBAND logo and icon are trademarks of GENBAND.

Contacts:
Kim Lee
GENBAND
+1.972.265.3766
kim.lee@genband.com

Frank Puglia
GENBAND
+1.972.265.3612
frank.puglia@genband.com