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Duo County Telephone, a Jamestown, Kentucky-based provider of communication services and Fiber to the Home or “FTTH” network, announced its migration to a MetaSwitch (News - Alert) softswitch to allow more flexibility and features in its voice offerings.

According to officials at Duo County Telephone, the company wanted to provide as seamless a transition as possible for its customers from the DMS100 platform to the MetaSwitch hosted platform.

The process of replacing the Centrex phones with IP phones was both cumbersome and labor-intensive for the company, they added.

The replacement required new cable running in many areas, additional power requirements for the phones, along with UPS considerations in many cases. The learning curve and unavoidable service interruptions for the customer led the company officials to reconsider their plan.

Duo County turned to the Portico Telephone VoIP Adapter or “TVA” from Citel to overcome the problems it had identified.

Portico TVA helps businesses migrate to IP telephony. Recently the Citel announced that the Portico Telephone VoIP Adapter is compliant with key Internet Protocol or “IP” unified communications solutions from Avaya, TMCnet reported.

To understand how to simplify life for both itself and its customers, Duo County acquired an evaluation unit and worked with CitelOs engineers.

Duo County was able to migrate with its customers to VoIP with minimal disruption by installing the Portico TVA. The customers could reuse the existing phone lines and power without any rewiring.

The TVA is installed where the existing demarc block is located for most of its clients. It can be accessed remotely to make any local changes or additions from its own offices.

For clients who are located close to its head office, Duo County could locate the TVAs in its own central office and use its own copper pairs to complete the migration without going to the customer’s premises.

Handset retention was another important positive factor, and directly affected the time spent training the customer after the migration. With this, Duo County has been able to hold customer changes to a minimum.

By moving to VoIP, customers gain a better Caller ID, easier transfer of calls and no longer needing to push a direct line key for an incoming call, more than outweighed any small changes that resulted from the switch, the company said.