By Stephen Hardy
Ohio-based services provider Horizon has embarked on a fiber to the premises (FTTP) deployment using 10G broadband transmission technology from Adtran, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADTN), the technology provider says.
Horizon will leverage Adtran’s TA 5000 platform as well as SaaS capabilities for the rollout, which saw its first community fibered in the third quarter of last year. Horizon provides services across Ohio, West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, and Indiana over a fiber network of more than 6000 miles.
The fiber backbone has been used principally to support business services requirements, according to Brad Riley, senior vice president of the Fiber to the Premises Business Unit at Horizon. That backbone also will now support the FTTP deployments, which will be limited, at least initially, to the company’s home state of Ohio.
Circleville, OH, kicked off the deployment last year. Riley said Horizon expects to pass 30,000 premises this year, which will make another three communities – Lancaster, Washington Courthouse, and Greenfield – ready for service by year end. He expects the deployment pace to accelerate to 100,000 passings per year in the near future.
The service provider is using an architecture that sees the optical line terminals housed in active cabinets within targeted communities; a fiber will run directly to each customer from the cabinet. Horizon is offering services up to 10 Gbps; Riley says that 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps are the most popular services so far.
With the company’s business services heritage as a reference, Riley says Horizon plans to deliver FTTP services on an SLA model, with latency an important element alongside reliability and symmetrical bandwidth. The SLA approach likely will prove useful as well in support of other applications; Riley revealed Horizon is looking at leveraging the infrastructure to support cell site backhaul requirements.
Such a use case would probably rely on Ethernet services rather than PON. The ability of the TA 5000 to support both PON and point-to-point topologies is one reason Horizon chose it to support the fiber network expansion, Riley says.