Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company moves 'Fiber Forward' with Calix Active Ethernet solutions
APRIL 20, 2010 -- Calix announced that Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company, a Round One award winner of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009’s Broadband Initiatives Program, has selected the Calix Unified Access portfolio to bring advanced Active Ethernet (AE) to thousands of premises in Morehouse Parish, La.
The company plans to move “Fiber Forward,” replacing its aging copper infrastructure with an advanced, standards-based fiber access network interconnected via 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet rings. The network is designed to deliver IPTV, residential, and business data services capable of delivering up to 1 Gbps to each premises, and reliable voice over IP (VoIP) services.
“The Broadband Stimulus program gave us the opportunity to start with a clean slate and build the network that would best serve the long term needs of our customers while providing the operations efficiencies we needed for sustainability,” says Mike George, president and general manager of Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company. “We knew from the start that Active Ethernet was the technology that we wanted to deploy -- the challenge was finding a solution that offered the modularity, flexibility, and capacity we needed to balance our service and operational requirements. The Calix E7 and the extensive Calix ONT portfolio are ideally suited to our strategic needs, and we look forward to delivering a host of advanced services to the residents of Morehouse Parish for years to come.”
Leveraging $12.4 million in Broadband Stimulus grants and loans, Northeast Louisiana Telephone plans to pull fiber and deploy Active Ethernet services throughout Morehouse Parish, a rural area dotted with large farms. In conjunction with this fiber access buildout, the company also plans to deploy a new digital IPTV headend and a Metaswitch softswitch for SIP VoIP services.
Enabling these services will be a variety of Calix platforms and products, including the E7 Ethernet Service Access Platform (ESAP), a wide range of Calix P-Series ONTs tailored for residential and business needs, and E5-110 Ethernet Service Access Nodes (ESANs) for copper services.