MERRILLVILLE — A small telecommunications company with its own network has poised itself to be the next David to SBC’s Goliath for area businesses.
Midwest Telecom of America, 1567 E. 93rd Ave., Merrillville, is putting the finishing touches on its network, a combination of Wi-Fi, high-speed Internet and Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and is expected to start converting its 1,500 business customers in Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties within the next month to the new system.
Once the network is up and running, the company will no longer rely on the phone behemoth for its telecommunication needs. That non-reliance will translate into hefty savings for its existing clients as well as anyone new, said MTA’s owners, Cary Smith and Jim Smutniak.
“SBC has been trying to lock its customers into signing three-, five- or seven-year contracts in anticipation of this, and that’s fine if businesses want to do that,” said Smutniak, who’s also the company’s vice president and CFO.
SBC currently provides switches, or mechanisms that allow calls from different companies including MTA to communicate with each other, Smith said. But because of an Federal Communications Commission ruling, SBC is no longer required to provide these switches after March 12, 2006.
That will automatically convert existing accounts with other telecoms to resale accounts, which are expensive to maintain and have bankrupted many a telephone company, according to Smith.
MTA’s network works by placing a small, 4-inch by 10-inch transmitter outside of a business that’s pointed toward another transmitter atop either the MTA tower on its property or another space. The two transmitters can talk to each other from up to a seven-mile radius but work best within three or four miles, Smith said. Inside, a business’ own telephone is hooked up to a modem that translates the analog data to digital and sends it to the transmitter outside.
As it stands now, a standard MTA connector can house 300 lines comfortably, Smith said.
Smith declined to give sales figures, but said his business customers currently save close to 30 percent by using their system.
Skip Bosak, who owns Bosak Chrysler in Merrillville, has been an MTA customer for 10 years and is looking forward to the network switch, which will happen in September for him.
“Cary called me on it today, and it sounds fantastic,” Bosak said. “I give him kudos for going up against the likes of SBC.”
MTA’s service is only available to businesses at the current time, but plans to expand to residential customers are in the works.