Pushing fiber into field and future

Twin Lakes Co-op brings fiber into the mix for upcoming services

It's not fiber to the home. Or to the curb. Or to the neighborhood, really. But like a lot of carriers, Twin Lakes Telephone Cooperative is pushing fiber farther toward its customers even though it has no immediate plans to roll out a triple play.

A 57-year-old co-op about an hour east of Nashville, Twin Lakes serves about 37,000 access lines in more than a dozen Tennessee communities. Last year the company saw the need to retire an aging DCO Class 5 switch, and to replace it, Twin Lakes picked a solution that offers flexibility to support the company's fiber deployment plans.

Starting last fall and finishing in February, Twin Lakes deployed Adtran's TotalAccess 5000 platform in its Cookesville South central office (CO). The telco had a longtime relationship with Adtran (based three hours south of Twin Lakes).

After penetrating the market for Tier 3 and then Tier 2 carriers, Adtran began shipping the TA5000, equipped for a range of fiber access and Ethernet services, to its first Tier 1 customer earlier this year. The vendor expects to ship to all three Tier 1 U.S. carriers before the end of the year.

Twin Lakes deployed the TA5000 in its COs but also farther out in the field — in remote huts, cabinets and pole-mounted enclosures. From the COs to those outside plant enclosures, the carrier ran gigabit Ethernet fiber rings. By pushing the gear out into the field, the telco shortened the length of its copper loops — typically from 12,000 or 18,000 feet down to 5000 — leaving less distance for broadband traffic to travel and thus, higher speeds.

“We can shorten the loops down as much as we need to,” said Wayne Gassaway, general manager for Twin Lakes. “It comes down to economics. The more we shorten the loops, the more we have to invest.”

All the traffic from the TA5000s was aggregated over gigabit Ethernet fiber connections to a backbone and transported about 25 miles away to a newly deployed CS2000 softswitch from Nortel Networks, which Twin Lakes plans to use for an eventual rollout of voice-over-IP (VoIP) service. In that effort, the company will be playing catch-up with giant competitors; Charter Communications and Comcast recently began offering VoIP service in Twin Lakes' own territory.

By distributing equipment from the CO to downstream in the network, the carrier also frees up space at the CO to make room for the new equipment needed to roll out services over the new, fatter pipes.

“This will eventually enable them to roll out video services whenever they're ready,” said Kevin Morgan, director of marketing for Adtran.

Though Twin Lakes' deployment was designed ultimately for a rollout of triple-play services, the company isn't saying when that might happen. “Right now we're just trying to upgrade our existing POTS,” Gassaway said.