Indiana independent running with fiber

A small independent telco in Indiana is the latest carrier on the block with a fiber-to-the-home network. Rochester Telephone announced it would deploy Wave7’s fiber-to-the-home/business architecture across its network 8700 access lines.

The 106-year-old investor-owned utility in north central Indiana already hosts its own ISP and resells long distance as well as runs a small CLEC with parallel facilities into Ameritech and Sprint territories -- all with only 34 employees. The FTTH network will allow Rochester Telephone to expand into high-speed Internet, IP voice and video programming services, offering triple-play services competing head to head with Comcast, said Rochester president Alan Terrell.

“We’ve never felt DSL was the solution,” Terrell said. “We’ve been looking at fiber to the home for about five years now, and we’ve even deployed fiber to the curb with our CLEC.”

Wave7’s solution uses Ethernet protocols as opposed to ATM over passive optical networking (PONs) to provide FTTH services, allowing data speeds up to 500 Mb/s but which can be throttled down to 256 kb/s. Rochester is also deploying General Bandwidth’s Voice Over IP gateway and bringing in analog video programming. Both the IP and analog RF signals will ride concurrently over the Ethernet signals on the Wave7’s architecture.

Rochester plans to deploy the solution both to new build-outs and over its current infrastructure over the next 24 months. It plans to have 1500 homes and business connected by the end of the year.