Texas CLEC selects Optical Solutions' GPON platform

September 22, 2005 Minneapolis, MN -- Optical Solutions (OSI) announced that Santa Rosa Telephone Cooperative of Vernon, Texas has initiated services using the company's FiberPath 500 gigabit passive optical network (GPON) system, in the first of several competitive FTTH deployments planned by the CLEC over the next five years.

Dennis Raines, general manager of Santa Rosa, says that residents and businesses in the community of Aspermont aren't hesitating to switch to the CLEC's advanced service package, which offers a "triple play" of fiber-optic voice, video / IPTV, and high-speed data services up to 1.5 Mbit/sec.

"We expect to achieve 80-90% take rates inside of 24 months," claims Raines.

The CLEC says it expects by the end of the decade to have fortified its 13 ILEC exchanges with an additional 21 CLEC exchanges, all based on fiber.

"Up until Aspermont we had been working with a fiber-to-the-node system, but then we began looking at the numbers for fiber all the way to the home, and we saw that with OSI's GPON we could get far greater bandwidth and future-proofing capacity for roughly the same cost," continues Raines.

OSI says its FiberPath 500 system is fully compliant with ITU FSAN standards, and is the among the industry's frontrunners in live IPTV deployments.

"We are pleased to be part of Santa Rosa's aggressive plans to deliver GPON-based FTTH services to underserved communities in Texas," concludes Mike Dagenais, Optical Solutions president and CEO. "As this customer and others have experienced, the business case they can make for GPON leads to FTTH being the right decision, whether it's a greenfield or brownfield application."