Jersey Telecom is a small telecoms carrier responsible for providing telephone and data services to about 90,000 people on the Channel Islands of Jersey and, shortly, Guernsey.

One of its biggest challenges is to roll out the new Internet Protocol (IP)-based data services being demanded by its business customers, many of which are large financial firms with strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. As a result, the operator has decided to upgrade its core network to handle more IP traffic and to future-proof its infrastructure to provide a new generation of services.

"All our switches are TDM-based and are now getting pretty old, and even obsolete," comments Jerry Rabaste, Jersey Telecom's chief technical officer. "We are limited in the amount of fixed bandwidth we can put across them, and they cannot do multimedia."

The carrier wanted to upgrade its network as quickly and as easily as possible. Rabaste believed Marconi's SoftSwitch - which overlays existing infrastructure - could help to accomplish this transition.

A soft switch is a software-based system that runs on standard networking hardware. In Jersey Telecom's case, SoftSwitch runs on Marconi's Multiservice Access Node (MSAN). As the system can be spread across multiple pieces of hardware located at multiple sites, SoftSwitch offers resilience, and does not require specialist buildings to house it, says Rabaste.

"If a building burns down, you don't lose your network," he says. "[The MSAN] doesn't take up a lot of space and only 350W of power, and you don't need to spend £450,000 on a lab room."

Training costs for the system have been low, says Bob Lawrence, Jersey Telecom's chief executive: "It takes one week to train someone used to TDM switches to use a soft switch, and there are huge cost savings."

As well as the Class 5 local exchange capabilities that every operator needs to run a telephone system, the SoftSwitch gives Jersey Telecom the means to provide a range of broadband services to business users. These services include ISDN, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), voice over IP (VoIP), and voice over DSL (VoDSL), as well as video broadcasting and other multimedia services.

"Jersey's requirement was to deliver voice services, and exploit broadband access to deliver new IP services, such as next-generation VoIP, business and residential xDSL [broadband] connectivity, and other data and video services, from a single packet-based platform," says Marconi's head of sales and marketing, Geoff Doy.

The combination of Marconi's SoftSwitch and MSAN gives the operator better control over the bandwidth allocated to individual customers, which can now be increased or reduced much more quickly. This flexibility - which extends to billing mechanisms that enable the carrier to derive more revenue from its services - is very important, according to Lawrence.

"Part of this is giving Jersey Telecom the flexibility to give its customers different things, such as virtual private networks [VPNs] that allow users to log in from anywhere in the world, Wi-Fi access or other things out there that we don't know they want yet. The key for that is to help bill for services in different ways," says Lawrence.

Lawrence believes that Jersey Telecom will eventually move its entire network, including its analogue voice services, onto an IP infrastructure, although he cannot say when this will happen. The firm also plans a 3G rollout for the islands, and is currently conducting a pilot scheme.