Enablence deploys municipal GPON fiber network in Spain

OCTOBER 5, 2010 -- Enablence Technologies Inc. says it has deployed a new all-optical next generation FTTX access network in the Municipality of Riba-Roja d'Ebre to help drive economic development and attract new employers.

Riba-Roja d'Ebre is a small community in Spain’s Terres de l’Ebre region. The municipality operates a legacy CATV infrastructure deployed in the 1990s for television broadcast. Looking to upgrade this infrastructure to roll out advanced video, data and voice services, Riba-Roja d'Ebre investigated the costs of upgrading its existing CATV build to DOCSIS 2.x standards. However, after evaluating the relatively high network aggregation costs due to the small size of its market, and the necessary investments in new equipment, the municipality determined that its needs were best served by replacing its coax plant with fiber to the home and business (FTTx), Enablence says.

Riba-Roja d'Ebre selected Enablence and its local partners TFO and apfutura to deploy a GPON. In the first stage of the network deployment, the municipality is connecting its subscribers with 10 Mbps of symmetrical bandwidth. As the growth of the subscriber base drives down aggregate connection costs, the connectivity speeds available on the network will rise. In addition to rolling out advanced video and data services to residential subscribers, the municipality plans to build an industrial park and lever the high-bandwidth service capability afforded by its new fiber network to draw employers to the area.

For its network build, Riba-Roja d'Ebre is using Enablence’s TRIDENT7 Universal Access Platform, ONTs, and element management system (EMS) software.

TFO, an international provider of FTTH products and services based in Spain, led the design, construction, and implementation of the Riba-Roja d'Ebre network using Enablence’s equipment. The other key partner on the project was apfutura, which integrated all the services and put the network into operation. Additional support came from local partners Servitet, which installed the passive infrastructure and will be in charge of network maintenance, and Alpha Enginyeria, which designed the network and supervised the deployment.

“After evaluating Riba-Roja d'Ebre’s needs, we determined that GPON technology best suited the community with the ideal tradeoff between performance, price, footprint and power efficiency,” said Xavier Sunyer, executive president of TFO. “Having the flexibility in one platform to deploy a network on any one or a combination of the three FTTx standards is a huge advantage.”

“Enablence’s TRIDENT7 was the obvious choice for us,” added Xavier Edo, general manager of Alpha Enginyeria. “The network deployment has been quite smooth thanks to the expertise and support of our partners on the project.”

“Riba-Roja d'Ebre demonstrates once again that the future-proof capabilities of fiber lie within the reach of even small municipalities to serve as a catalyst for economic development,” said Tim Thorsteinson, CEO of Enablence. “While the circumstances and business factors vary between municipalities and cable system operators, Riba-Roja d'Ebre shows that the cost of deploying an all-optical fiber network, which will be cutting edge for decades to come, can be quite competitive with upgrading existing legacy copper or coax.”

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