Dalton FTTH network paying off

Having achieved its goals in deploying fiber to the home for two years in Dalton, Ga., Dalton Utilities is now branching out into the surrounding Whitfield County area and beginning to explore delivering wholesale services and deploying a faster Gigabit passive optical network.

OptiLink, Dalton Utilities’ triple play bundle of services, has achieved 49% penetration in its first two phases, and is generating $83 average revenue per user at a cost of $59.23, Ray Buzzard, vice president of communications at Dalton Utilities told a Fiber to the Home Council teleconference Thursday.

“We expect to hit 60% of the units past by the end of the year,” Buzzard said. “We are ahead of our business plan – we were projected to hit payback in 12 years and we’ll beat that by two years.”

The company plans to pass 9000 homes in the county, and get a take rate of 45% minimum. This month, it is also turning up a gigabit PON network to deliver more bandwidth in areas where unanticipated demand is taxing its existing Alcatel PON gear.

The growing problem for Dalton Utilities, if there is one, is that neighborhoods are clamoring for the service faster than the network can be built.

”I’ve had communities in the county come to me saying 100% of their residents will sign up for the service, if we’ll build it,” he said. Buzzard said the hallmark of the offering is customer service, which the company provides around the clock.

“When our customers call customer service, they get a human being, and a human being that sounds like them, with an Appalachian twang,” he said. “If we can’t fix your problem, we roll a truck. A lot of times, it’s a matter of plugging something back in, but we do it anyway.”

In fact, they send trucks out 18 hours of the day, right up until midnight, he Buzzard said.

Dalton Utilities launched its FTTH project in February of 2003 at a time where there wasn’t broadband available locally, Buzzard said, and turned up its first customer in August. The company now has about more than 6500 customers and is projecting a total of 6000 residential and 600 business customers by year’s end, Buzzard said.

Its passive optical network gear delivers Internet access at speeds of 1 megabit per second to 4 megabits per second for $27.95 a month to $69.95 a month. Local phone service costs $18.95 and includes voice mail and advanced calling features such as caller ID at no additional cost. Dalton is offering four channels of high definition TV as well as video on demand and local programming such as high school football games, Buzzard said. The company will start local ad insertion this fall, along with adding a Voice over IP Centrex offering for businesses.