Big River Telephone

Big River Telephone began in 1984 as LDD, Inc. LDD was primarily a long distance telephone service provider until The Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the communication market. After this, LDD started competing for local telephone service.

In 2001, independent investors acquired the assets of LDD, Inc. The former LDD image was phased out and the company took a new look and approach to the telecommunication industry as Big River Telephone Company, LLC. Over the next several years, Big River Telephone acquired several small local Internet service providers, including one of the leading ISPs in the area, Clas.net. Big River also acquired Cascade.net in 2005 and Atprs.net in 2008.

Big River Telephone's service platform took a technological leap after their Voice over Internet Protocol local switching network was established in 2004. This new approach allowed Big River Telephone to deliver regular telephone service with enhanced features as well as high speed Internet and other advanced data services to small businesses and residential customers. The completion of the VoIP local switching network assisted in the implementation of a new product called Integrated Communications Exchange (ICE). The ICE technology combines high-speed data with voice signals over the same connection minimizing the number of wired connections.

Big River Telephone is providing VoIP services to cable providers across the United States.

Customer service

One of the backbones of Big River Telephone's has customer relationship management (CRM) software from The Sage Group.

Big River digital telephone services

Big River Telephone has partnered with cable companies. This technology allows cable companies to offer their subscribers the “triple play” bundle of video, data and voice service. Big River Telephone provides cable operators the ability to add full-featured residential and business telephony services to their existing customer base quickly and efficiently. Big River Telephone provides back-office platform support, network connectivity for voice traffic, support for operations and marketing and technical support. Currently Big River Telephone is providing back-office support and service to cable operations in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Minnesota, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, Nebraska, Indiana, and Georgia.

Telecommunications networking

Big River Telephone Company operates a network of class 4 and class 5 switches. To ensure reliability and security, Big River has implemented Class 5 VoIP switching technologies by MetaSwitch. With the deployment of MetaSwitch equipment on their network, Big River is able to deliver the advantages of VoIP technology directly to the end user. The implementation of the MetaSwitch allows Big River the opportunity to streamline its existing operations and to expand its innovative services including VoIP from a single platform. This technology is the core of delivering dial tone, connecting calls, providing call features, and routing calls for Big River Telephone Company. The Big River telephone and MetaSwitch relationship is an active public partnership program that is engineering focused to ensure that both companies can co-operatively work together on any interoperability matters.

Web interface technologies

Big River Telephone has internally developed web applications available to the public via Big River's teleconferencing and voicemail products.