West Kentucky and Tennessee Telecommunications Cooperative (WK&T) is deploying the FieldSmart fiber management and protection platform from Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLFD) in the central office of its fiber to the home (FTTH) roll out, according to Clearfield.
The project uses $123.8 million in loans and grant money from the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act broadband stimulus effort. WK&T’s deployment is the largest stimulus-funded project in the country focused on wireline services, Clearfield asserts.
WK&T plans to use the FTTH network to offer advanced telecommunications services to 21,000 homes and businesses across the company's nine-county service area in west Kentucky and northwest Tennessee. Construction has begun on three of the 22 exchanges within the serving area. The project should be completed within the next three years.
"We conducted a thorough and stringent process of selecting partners for the stimulus award at West Kentucky,” said Ray Cantrell, CTO of WK&T. “Clearfield's dedication to superior functionality and technology at a fair price were the prime factors in our selection. "Not only do the panel systems allow us the flexibility to deploy in multiple environments, but the cassettes offer many different features that we feel are an added value."
WK&T has used Clearfield products for other deployments as well.