NPG Cable, a triple-play communications provider serving 100,000 subscribers, recently started a deployment of digital phone services for business customers based on technology from MetaSwitch.

The staged rollout will eventually cover three states and grow to include new features that use MetaSphere, the MetaSwitch service delivery platform and applications suite.

“Out of all the suppliers I’ve worked with in the past, MetaSwitch has absolutely been the most attentive to our needs,” said Liam Catherall, information systems director at NPG Cable, in a prepared statement. “We gave them an extremely tight deadline and their response was remarkable.”

Catherall said that MetaSwitch was particularly well suited to NPG Cable’s phased deployment of business digital phone service. Gradually phasing in the new service in Missouri, California and Arizona where it operates cable systems, NPG Cable first deployed business digital phone services in August using a network-based call signaling (NCS) offering targeted at enterprises with less than six lines.

“We wanted the flexibility of starting with NCS so we didn’t have to do a lot of training of our installers, allowing us to more quickly get into the marketplace, and then later grow to a more feature-rich offering,” Catherall said. “Our initial deployment went really well and we’re looking at the rest of it going equally well.”