Calix counts on smart grid to feed fiber builds

Broadband access gear vendor Calix announced a pair of municipal broadband projects this week, including one in Concord, Mass., that hints at the potential for smart grid projects to drive investment in fiber-based architectures.

Both the town of Concord and the city of Highland, Ill., are deploying the Calix Unified Access portfolio. The vendor claims that the $4.5 million Concord deployment, orchestrated by government utility Concord Municipal Light, is the first smart grid project in the U.S. that combines GPON and wireless technologies. The Calix E7 Ethernet Service Access Platform is being used to deliver GPON to the Calix 700GX/GE optical network terminals located at wireless collector sites attached to transformers in the network, Calix said. The configuration will allow the utility to better manage peak energy demand and allow residents to monitor their own energy usage using tools like Google’s PowerMeter.

Geoff Burke, senior director of corporate marketing at Calix, said long-anticipated smart grid projects may finally be driving a new round of fiber deployments. There are several reasons for the spike. “There is both federal and state funding available for smart grid deployments. As current or aspiring communications service providers are evaluating their fiber plans, it provides yet another source of funding,” Burke said, adding, “Along a complementary line of thought, it is a natural value added service to be deployed over a fiber network and can generate real savings or revenue for a service provider, depending on whether they are a municipality that run their own electric utility, or a traditional telco that is working in conjunction with the local utility and being paid for enabling the efficiencies.”

Lastly, Burke said, “Smart grid is proving to be a natural catalyst for pulling fiber forward in the access network, encouraging service providers to pull fiber incrementally out to at least the transformers, which are becoming wireless aggregation points for smart grid in their networks, thereby laying the foundation for future deployment all the way to the home or business.”

The revenue and cost savings angles in particular mean that smart grid projects are becoming a significant contributor to the average fiber access business case, Burke said, whether it is GPON or Active Ethernet being deployed. Municipalities deploying fiber on their own may look at the bottom line savings, while a telco or other service provider involved in such projects may focus more on how smart grid revenue can be added to the top line of their business cases, he said.

The second project announced this week, in Highland, Ill., near St. Louis, is a municipal build being carried out in the absence of other broadband options from service providers for the town’s 9,400 residents. Highland is deploying Calix C7 Multiservice Access Platforms, E7 Ethernet Service Access Platforms and 700GX/GE ONTs to set up the potential for 1 Gb/s to each premises, an ambitious, but increasingly popular speed goal.

Burke said the municipal projects are part a healthy environment for spending on all kinds of broadband projects and technologies, including GPON, Active Ethernet and VDSL. That activity no doubt played into Calix’s reasoning for its recently-announced Occam Networks acquisition. Overall market conditions, including low interest rates, increasing competition, government subsidies and increasing demand for video, are helping to prime the pump for vendors like Calix.

“Clearly, broadband stimulus has allowed a number of service providers to rapidly move fiber forward using both [GPON and Active Ethernet], and over the summer we have begun to see the first waves of orders for these projects begin rolling in,” Burke said. “Although some are VDSL2, the vast majority are GPON and Active Ethernet. That said, we are still in the very early stages, and expect the momentum to continue to pick up as we move into the latter part of this year and next.”