Vibrant Broadband scores new efficiencies with middle mile network upgrade
Key Highlights
- Vibrant Broadband is building hybrid fiber and fixed wireless networks to improve rural internet access in Minnesota, serving over 7,000 customers since 2019.
- The company leverages fiber for electric grid management and broadband delivery, connecting substations with fiber for SCADA and smart grid functionalities.
- Upgrading middle mile infrastructure with Ribbon’s NPT 2100 routers and MUSE platform enhances network capacity, management, and scalability to support future technology demands.
- Funding from FCC’s ReConnect, Minnesota’s Border to Border, and BEAD programs supports network redundancy and expansion into unserved and underserved areas.
- Vibrant’s focus on network normalization and automation reduces operational costs and prepares the network for multi-gig services like XGS-PON, ensuring readiness for increasing bandwidth needs.
Vibrant Broadband, part of Meeker Energy, is another example of how electric cooperatives are taking their rural broadband matters into their own hands.
In 2018, Vibrant Broadband began building its hybrid fiber optic and fixed wireless infrastructure for rural members who had electricity. This hybrid system allows us to offer brilliant speeds throughout a widespread area.
Vibrant Broadband provides fiber-fed Internet to businesses and residents of Meeker, Kandiyohi, Wright, Stearns, McLeod, and Renville counties in Central Minnesota.
Andrew Kalkbrenner, IT Manager at Vibrant Broadband, said that the cooperative’s decision was a response to the limited options its members had.
“In 2018, Meeker’s board decided to go with broadband because we were hearing from our members in our rural community, we served with electricity were saying they needed a better broadband connection,” he said. “A lot of members only had satellite or low-speed DSL from whoever the incumbent telco was in the area.”
And while its broadband network has been growing, the service provider has been enhancing its supporting middle mile facilities that serve as the network backbone. By employing Ribbon’s platforms, Kalkbrenner said it can “expand our service offerings, better serve our growing customer base, and support future technologies."
Two-fold broadband approach
Considering the rural landscape that Vibrant Broadband serves, the cooperative is leveraging fiber for two purposes: gaining greater visibility into its electric business and delivering broadband.
By building out fiber to its electric infrastructure, the cooperative gained greater visibility. Electric providers can use the fiber for Substation Automation and control, enabling SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) and supporting modern smart grid functionalities like asset condition monitoring and remote control.
“As part of the fiber build, we connected all our substations with fiber, which helped us on the electric side to monitor and manage facilities, but more importantly, we were able to get high-speed internet to our electric cooperative members,” Kalkbrenner said.
Vibrant delivers broadband service via a two-pronged approach of broadband wireless and fiber. It connects fiber 125 monopoles to deliver fixed wireless broadband and then PON-based FTTH service.
Today, Vibrant offers its PON-based fiber broadband services within the areas where it has built its fiber network, with expansion plans in the works. Since it officially launched service in 2019, it has served 7,000 broadband customers.
“We serve everyone along the fiber route and have applied for grants to build out even more of our territory,” Kalkbrenner said. “We’ve even expanded outside of the territory.”
Accelerating middle mile needs
With the growth of its broadband network, Vibrant had to consider the middle mile backbone network that supported its services.
Previously, the service provider had been leveraging a platform that supported transport and handing off to access equipment. The transport network, or middle mile network, was running on the same gear as its access gear because it was a platform that would allow multiple services to work together.
It had a series of 10G ERPS (Ethernet Ring Protection Switching) rings, which create redundant Ethernet ring networks, preventing network loops and ensuring continuous, rapid failover in under 50 milliseconds.
However, this configuration had various drawbacks. “It became very messy because we could only hook in certain places, and we were running out of capacity on those rings as consumer streaming service demands rose,” Kalkbrenner said. “We decided we needed to do something better in terms of ease of management as well as having higher bandwidth capability.”
This drove Vibrant through a journey to separate its access network from its transport network. It chose Ribbon’s NPT 2100, a compact, high-performance IP aggregation router, and the MUSE Multilayer Automation Platform due to its optionality.
“Ribbon not only had great customer support, but their MUSE system has great network management tools,” Kalkbrenner said. “Because it is MPLS-based, it is easier to operate than traditional Ethernet ring platforms.”
Besides taking care of its electric infrastructure and supporting its FTTH and wireless broadband networks, Vibrant sees several wholesale application opportunities for the middle mile networks.
It is working with other providers using its service to resell the internet to consumers, as well as providing facilities for wireless backhaul. “The middle mile network is mainly for our members, but there are several other opportunities,” Kalkbrenner said. “Also, there are other electric companies we’re able to help tie some of their facilities together to operate more efficiently and have private connectivity between locations to help with security.”
Alleviating choke points
For Ribbon, the relationship with Vibrant reflects the company’s ongoing work with Tier 2 and Tier 3 service providers.
Elizabeth Page, U.S. Regional Sales Leader for Ribbon, said Vibrant’s move shows that more service providers that are enhancing their last mile broadband networks should be thinking more about the implications of a sound middle mile network.
“Middle mile had a little blip and noticed a few years ago, and there was a large focus on the last mile and access, but very few people are doing the math that Andrew did,” she said. “When you start doing the math and adding up the subscribers that are getting bandwidth speeds of a minimum of 100/20 Mbps or symmetrical multi-gig services, the question becomes what does that mean for the broadband aggregation layer, which is the middle mile.”
She added that as more providers focus on the last mile, “they are not doing the math of what happens when I add all this up, you create a throttle point if you don’t design your access network without taking into consideration the middle mile network into consideration from the very beginning.”
Besides alleviating potential choke points, updating the middle mile allows a provider to normalize their network. Providers like Vibrant have to manage multiple wireless and wireline PON platforms from various vendors.
“If you can normalize the network at the broadband aggregation layer, put in a network that can meet your demands today and grow if you need to, you won’t be immediately met with that throttle point,” Page said. “The services that are going to be demanded on the networks are latency intolerant, so it takes a company like Vibrant to think two or three steps out at the beginning.”
PON lays speed opportunities
Like other electric cooperatives that have an established FTTH business, Vibrant started with GPON and 2.5 Gbps symmetrical.
It is fast-moving to XGS-PON, which provides 10 Gbps services, in two to three markets.
And with a more robust middle mile network in place, Kalkbrenner said Vibrant is confident it can accommodate new iterations of PON and traffic increases as they arise.
“As the demand increases, we’re ready to put that in because we now have the capacity on the backend,” Kalkbrenner said. “As customers go from 1 to 10 Gbps services, we don’t have to worry about our middle mile because it’s already done.”
He added that “we can slide new optics in and install a new ONT on the side of a resident customer’s house, and we’re not bandwidth constrained.”
Funding for network redundancy
To support Vibrant’s ongoing broadband drive, the service provider has been pursuing various federal and state funding sources.
The service provider received some funding from the FCC’s ReConnect program and Minnesota’s Border to Border program. It is also pursuing BEAD funding.
Minnesota's Border-to-Border Broadband (B2B) Grant Program provides financial resources for internet service providers (ISPs) to build high-speed internet infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas of the state. The program, administered by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), helps fund projects up to 50% of eligible costs, including project planning, permits, and construction.
“We have received some funding,” Kalkbrenner said. “One of the things we think of as an electric company a lot is redundancy, so in our electric network, we can back-feed substations and keep power on as much as possible.”
But the broadband funding it has received is being applied to the middle mile.
When it designed its broadband and its accompanying middle mile network, Vibrant gave both the same attention to redundancy as it has on its electric network.
“We could lose a chassis and continue to operate,” Kalkbrenner said. “We’re using some of our funding to help us in the middle mile area to make it redundant to keep the service up and running and expanding to other places.”
He added, “If you don’t have redundancy set up and low latency, you can put in whatever access gear you want, but it does not matter because you get it back to the internet.”
Monetizing the network
As Vibrant and other providers look to monetize the middle mile by providing services like wireless backhaul or lit services to data centers, there will be a greater need for network management.
Within these contracts, wireless operators or a data center provider will tie service level agreements (SLAs) to those contracts.
By using the MUSE Multilayer Automation Platform, Vibrant can gain control, analysis, design, and planning applications to maximize the ROI of IP Optical investments.
“Whether you are looking at the middle mile network or if you’re offering backhaul services through the NEPTUNE solution or a link out for data center interconnection, all of that comes back to MUSE,” Page said. “MUSE is a force multiplier with one screen, and once a salesperson sells a service, you don’t want to have to look at multiple screens to get that operational and manage your broadband network as a business.”
Page added that Ribbon is getting more of its customers who are pursuing broadband funding programs how to monetize the new network capabilities they are building.
“There’s funding one time for CapEx, but there’s not OpEx funding,” she said. “You have to run it as a business and be operationally smart, do more with less, and MUSE helps providers do that.”
Kalkbrenner agreed and added that before it adopted Ribbon’s platforms, it had to log into every piece of equipment from point A to B. “We had to look at multiple devices and build that circuit all the way through,” he said. “With a few button clicks on MUSE, we can build the entire network, and it lowers your operational expense as a company because you’re not spending time building circuits and do it in a tenth of the time.”
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About the Author
Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.