March 3, 2005 Corning, NY and San Marcos, TX -- Grande Communications, a locally-owned communications provider serving southwestern Texas, announced today that it will deploy Corning's platform in its first FTTH deployment. More than 20,000 km of fiber will be deployed in a passive optical network (PON) FTTH network in Austin and San Antonio, with plans to pass 23,000 homes this year.
"Grande is demonstrating true leadership in bringing fiber to the home to its customers, and we are delighted to support them in that," remarks Billy Pyatt, vice president of public networks sales and marketing for Corning.
According to a press release, Corning, a diversified technology company that develops fiber-optic products, will supply its Evolant platform, which includes the company's NexCor FTTH fiber, OptiSheath Advantage terminals, OptiTect Advantage cabinets, and SST-Drop cables. The company says its Evolant products are designed to enable the easy, rapid addition of subscribers from a local convergence point to the customer premises.
"NexCor fiber gives us the ability to design a cost-effective network while giving us the flexibility to adapt our network to future needs," contends Joe Ross, president of Grande Communications. "The Evolant Solution allows us to significantly reduce our deployment time so that we can speed delivery of broadband services to our customers."
According to the company, its singlemode, fully ITU-T G.652.D-compliant NexCor fiber is the only one specified for all PON transmission wavelengths, providing optimal FTTH performance with backward compatibility to the company's SMF-28e fiber, resulting in twice the optical launch power compared with other fibers in its class. Further, the company says its OptiSheath terminals and OptiTect cabinets feature craft-friendly, field-proven designs that dramatically reduce the time and complexity of FTTH installation.