Competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) TelePacific is piloting software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) technology as a way to deliver services outside its network footprint, which is currently limited to California, Texas, and Nevada.

The CLEC is initially offering hosted PBX, MPLS, and other services to customers in New York, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and Washington as part of its national pilot.

Although the company calls the SD-WAN program a pilot, it does have several live customers using the technology.

“One of our customers needed to bring up a new site and connect it to their existing TelePacific MPLS network, but the site was outside of our traditional footprint. With SD-WAN, we are able to securely tunnel all of their MPLS traffic through our gateway back to the TelePacific core and connect it to their private MPLS network of sites,” says Jared Martin, TelePacific’s director of network architecture and security.

The company is working with one SD-WAN vendor but isn’t ready to reveal that firm, according to Dave Zahn, SVP of marketing at TelePacific. “In the long term our feeling is that this technology is moving fast and we do want to keep our options open.”

Zahn adds that because the company has traditionally been a regional operator, it wasn’t able to offer nationwide services. But with SD-WAN it can now expand nationally without having to deploy a network. “SD-WAN allows us to expand our addressable market very quickly. And we don’t have to put an SD-WAN gateway in every market. It’s very scalable.”

Last March the company acquired unified communications company DSCI, which Zahn says, coupled with the SD-WAN pilot, gives it the opportunity to expand its unified communications offerings. “SD-WAN will enable more use cases,” he says.