Comcast Business has brought its Ethernet and voice services to Elwyn, a 5,000-employee human services nonprofit, a contract win that illustrates how the cable MSO is gaining market share in the medium and large business services segment.
Elwyn will use the new Ethernet-based network to transition to electronic medical record (EMR) and hosted cloud services, which will improve sharing of client and health information and centralize its HR and payroll functions.
A key element of this contract is how many sites it needs to accommodate.
Already serving 20,000 individuals at a individuals at a variety of campus locations, community sites, schools, workplaces and individual residences across the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and California, Elwyn tapped its longtime trusted technology consultant, Chorus Communications to procure a technology solution to centralize IT-based health and HR services.
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For its part, Comcast Business provided Elwyn with a 14-site Ethernet Network Service (ENS) connecting the nonprofit’s 12 offices and two data centers with capacity ranging from 20-500 Mbps. Additionally, Elwyn implemented PRI Trunks, a hosted voice solution, across six of its locations in Pennsylvania and Delaware for efficiency and call clarity, as well as Business Internet at more than 85 sites nationwide to allow its clients to get online from its residential locations.
By installing the new Ethernet and PRI infrastructure, Elwyn can transfer patient EMRs between offices and data centers and employ Chorus Communications’ collocated hosting services to create a centralized, offsite network infrastructure.
“The time before and after our transition to Comcast Business was like night and day. We’ve quadrupled our network capacity but are still paying the same amount we were with our previous provider,” said Edwin Rodriguez, director of IT operations at Elwyn, in a release. “Our teams can access the information they need as if they were sitting next to each other rather than from the other side of the country, and our network can scale as we continue rolling out new technologies across our organization.”
While this is not the only large-scale contract Comcast Business has won, the Elwyn win illustrates how cable operators are becoming a larger threat to the incumbent telcos in the domestic Ethernet race.
Vertical Systems Group said in its 2017 U.S. Cable MSO Ethernet Leaderboard that what’s helping cable MSOs advance their Ethernet ranking is steady fiber network expansions to more businesses.
The research firm noted that Comcast had the highest organic growth rate of companies across all 2017 U.S. Carrier Ethernet Leaderboards.