NetAmerica Alliance Opens its ‘SuperCenter’ NOC for 4G LTE

NetAmerica Alliance (NAA) announced the opening of their ‘SuperCenter’ and 24/7 network operations center (NOC). The NetAmerica Alliance SuperCenter houses the IMS based core of the 4G LTE wireless network they are building to be used by their rural wireless network operator affiliates.

NAA is hoping to build an alliance of rural 4G LTE wireless operators by aggregating and sharing some operational and marketing costs. “The services provided by the SuperCenter are important to our Alliance Members, but that only represents one facet of our alliance model,” said Roger Hutton, Chairman and CEO of NetAmerica in a press release. “National marketing and selling programs, shared best practices for service delivery and customer care, and advanced application development are some other of the many benefits members realize by joining the Alliance.”

NAA is partnering with Ericsson for the IMS core. “IMS forms the basis for NetAmerica to fulfill one of its core responsibilities to its members, which is to continually drive increasing levels of member revenue by enabling those members to offer a rich array of services and applications to their customers,” said NAA in a press release.

Their operator affiliates utilize 700 MHz or AWS spectrum to build local 4G wireless networks, and leverage the assets of NAA, including the 4G LTE core network located in Houston, Texas, to deliver services to their end customers. NAA tells Telecompetitor they have four affiliates signed up to date “…covering a license area of 1.67M POPs and 47,000 square miles.”

NAA is also apparently expanding their approach. “We also formed a regional partnering program which allows adjacent carriers to work together to share expertise and infrastructure in the rollout of their local services and interest is growing in that model,” says Chuck Harris, Senior Vice President at Net America Alliance in an emailed statement.

NAA is one of a few initiatives that target rural 4G LTE wireless operators. Others include Verizon’s Rural LTE in America program and LightSquared’s wholesale 4G LTE program. NAA and Verizon are much further along than LightSquared, given that LightSquared hasn’t even begun building a network yet and is currently embroiled in a number of challenges to get their model off the ground, literally and figuratively.