CableRunner North America launches pilot project to build San Francisco's first city-owned fiber-in-the-sewer infrastructure

4 June 2003 Boca Raton, FL Lightwave -- CableRunner North America, LLC, a business venture partly owned and operated by the City of Vienna, Austria, Water and Sewer Department, agreed to provide the city and county of San Francisco with up to 2 miles of fiber-optic connectivity using its Flexible system technology as a pilot project.

The pilot project will commence this month, enabling the Department of Telecommunications and Information Services to connect additional city facilities to E-Net, the city-owned public-safety fiber-optic network that links city government buildings. San Francisco used conventional methods and conduit in the rights of way to deploy the first phase of E-Net. CableRunner proposed a solution that allowed the city to connect buildings more difficult to reach.

"San Francisco has always been a technology leader," said Mayor Willie Brown. "This pilot project with CableRunner and the City of Vienna is a great opportunity for us to continue as one of the most wired cities in the nation."

Denise Brady, DTIS deputy director commented on the project: "San Francisco is pleased to make city property available to test this new technology as we demonstrate our commitment to the deployment of broadband services. We hope to encourage technology service providers to expand the service available to our citizens."

The pilot project will demonstrate CableRunner's Flexible system and FiberCop robotics capabilities. Fifty percent of the pilot project will be performed in man-accessible sewer pipes using CableRunner's two-man crew mounting vehicle. The remaining 50% will be performed in non-man accessible sewer pipes ranging from 12 to 24 inches in diameter using CableRunner's patented FiberCop robotics that navigates pipes and performs "all-at-once" infrastructure installation. The pilot project includes the installation of four hand-holes, placement of building lateral connections through sewer clean-outs, placement of CableRunner Flexible profiles, Microducts , blowing tubes, and up to 2 miles of two-strand bundled fiber. Each Microduct houses up to 19 Individual Fiber Tubes (IFTs) - the heart of CableRunner's Flexible system. Each IFT works as an independent fiber conduit allowing extremely fast, flexible, and secure connectivity.

The resulting fiber infrastructure is scalable, upgradeable, interchangeable, integrates existing provider fiber infrastructures and works with common fiber-optic cable and/or micro cable for backbone, modular cable system for access, and any kind of fiber regardless of manufacturer.

The San Francisco pilot project comes on the heels of recent CableRunner installations including the completion of 400 km of backbone/access in Vienna, Austria, 25 km of backbone in Zagreb, Croatia, and 8 km added onto 30 km for backbone/redundancy in Salzburg, Austria.