The city of Martinsville offers the best of both worlds: small-town feel with big city impact. Situated in southwestern Virginia, the city has a population of around 11,000 with countless visitors each year thanks to its renowned Martinsville Speedway. The NASCAR racing track, built in 1947, is one of the first of its kind in the nation and has hosted famed racers including Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch and Richard Petty. The city has a special appeal that you can’t find just anywhere.
Part of this appeal is the city’s unique communications setup. Unlike most cities, Martinsville decided to sell phone and Internet service to its business customers to deliver better experiences and create new economic opportunities. “It was becoming difficult for us to get new businesses in town,” explained Martinsville Network Engineer, Jared Pruett. "We just needed business-capable services, but the carriers in our area were not interested in upgrading. When they weren’t able to deliver, we decided to do it on our own.”
In going its own way, the city was tasked with finding a reliable service provider whose solutions could be successfully leveraged as an M-LCA, or a municipal exchange. It was certainly an interesting proposition, and one that we were thrilled to be a part of when the city decided to implement Avaya IP Office—our simple, powerful, scalable unified communications solution—along with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for backup and redundancy.
What started out as 20 business customers is now close to 200, with the number of customers having doubled every year for the last five years. “In the beginning, it was the city school system that needed to upgrade its phone system,” Pruett explained. “That’s when businesses started asking, ‘If you can do that for them, can you do it for us?’ Being a small city, word of mouth travels fast. More and more businesses began asking if we could provide them phone and Internet service. It just kind of took a life of its own.”
Here’s how Avaya supported the city of Martinsville for economic growth and prosperity: