Optical Solutions wins AFC’s first FTTP customer

The first customer to deploy Advanced Fibre Communications’ fiber-to-the-premises equipment has decided to deploy gear from an AFC rival, Optical Solutions, for some new residential developments.

Pembroke Telephone, an independent carrier in Pembroke, Ga., serving about 4200 lines, will deploy Optical Solutions’ FiberPath 500 gigabit passive optical networking (GPON) platform in four impending greenfield housing developments, two of which are currently under construction. Victoria Place and Barrington Point, which will contain 170 homes, should both be completed by early next year.

"It all goes back to bandwidth," said Steve Rogerson, a Pembroke Telephone central office supervisor, regarding the choice of a new vendor. To deliver video, Pembroke planned on using RF overlays, converting RF signals to optical ones. But in the future, the carrier wants to use more switched digital video, which requires extra bandwidth in the FTTP network. To deliver the necessary bandwidth, Pembroke’s choice was between deploying multiple Sonet OC-12s with AFC’s gear or Optical Solutions’ gear, which offers gigabit-per-second Internet Protocol traffic. Optical Solutions’ gear offered the benefit of a quicker deployment.

In October 2003, AFC named Pembroke its first customer for the FTTP equipment it unveiled the previous summer. One of the biggest factors in choosing AFC’s gear, Pembroke told Telephony then, was the fact that Pembroke already had 24 AFC digital loop carriers in its network and could easily and inexpensively upgrade them to FTTP by changing line cards.

When asked this week whether Pembroke would look to Optical Solutions or AFC for any future FTTP equipment needs, Rogerson said, "We’re not sure. That all depends on where both companies are sitting by the end of first, maybe second quarter of next year."