EarthLink outsources 9-1-1 capabilities to Bandwidth, enhances focus on customer acquisition

EarthLink is handing over the keys of its 9-1-1 network capabilities to Bandwidth as part of its effort to refocus on retaining and attracting new customers for its growing suite of business services.

Through its partnership with Bandwidth, which will now manage its 9-1-1 service nationwide, EarthLink will be able to collapse multiple databases into one.

"After an extensive review, EarthLink decided it's to their advantage to outsource their 9-1-1 network and allow us to provide that service to them and allow them to focus on customer retention, acquisition and other core competencies they want to develop," said Ken Grelck, senior vice president of sales for Bandwidth, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "There will be millions of subscribers that will be migrating to us and we'll be enabling them on a national basis for all of their 911 records that go across people in their current CLEC territory as where they are moving outside of their footprint."

Since EarthLink will be able to leverage Bandwidth's consolidated nationwide database of customer endpoints and nationwide emergency call routing platform, they will be able to balance service efficiency and reliability in delivering emergency services to their customers.

In transitioning to Bandwidth's solution, EarthLink will use Bandwidth's APIs for provisioning, managing, turning on and turning off 9-1-1 services.

Grelck said they will "support the 9-1-1 dialing plan and connect to right Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) when they make a phone call so we route the call to the right PSAP and right location regardless of where the phone is."

While this deal is new, neither EarthLink nor Bandwidth are strangers to one another. Bandwidth has been providing 9-1-1 services to EarthLink since 2010.

Similar to its earlier deal to provide national VoIP services to TDS for its teleworker product, Grelck said they are seeing other service providers approaching them to go down a similar route.

"This goes to the trend in the CLEC market where other providers like TDS are outsourcing their voice infrastructure on a nationwide basis," Grelck said. "We're seeing more and more of these competitive LECs looking to focus less on the infrastructure and outsource it and focus more on their customers, customer acquisitions and other core competencies."

For more:
- see the release

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