Source: Alcatel Lucent Press Release

The City of Opelika, Alabama will soon be providing residents with the ability to monitor and manage their own energy consumption to help save money and make their homes greener with the help of smart grid technology from Alcatel-Lucent. A new fiber optic network will also give residents the opportunity to access new high-quality broadband voice, data and video services, including lightning-fast Internet access, IPTV and video-on-demand services.

A new high-capacity ‘Fiber-to-the-home’ (FTTH) network will bring these broadband connections to households and businesses and allow Opelika Power Services to extend the reach of its ‘smart grid’, supporting new power sensors and smart meters across the city.

Residents will be offered advanced meter reading devices providing them with real-time information about the amount of energy being used in their households.  As a result, they will be able to identify when their usage is at a peak and when there are opportunities, day or night, to reduce consumption and save money.

Under the three-year project Alcatel-Lucent will deliver a Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) optical backbone network in the City of Opelika based on Alcatel-Lucent’s Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology. The project also includes full services and integration of the Alcatel-Lucent ‘Triple Play Express’ solution for regional operators. To allow the City of Opelika to deliver voice, data and video to residents, Alcatel-Lucent’s Optical Network Terminal will be deployed at residences and the 7750 Ethernet Service Switch will provide service aggregation, bandwidth management and subscriber control.  Alcatel-Lucent has also been selected as the integrator of the City of Opelika’s IPTV service, which runs on the Microsoft Mediaroom solution.

Source: The Jamestown Sun

According to an article in The Jamestown Sun, the combined efforts of Dickey Rural Networks and Dakota Central Telecommunications have brought fiber-optic broadband services to about 16,000 businesses and homes in south central North Dakota. The article said that the project is the largest geographic area in North America served by fiber optic cables directly to the home.

The combined projects totaled about $90 million and included funding from USDA Rural Development and loans from other sources. The Rural Development funds included additional money from the federal stimulus package, The Jamestown Sun reported.

“What you’ve done with these two cooperatives is set the standard for the entire United States,” said Dallas Tonsager, USDA Rural Development undersecretary. “This area serves as a great role model for the rest of the country.”

Source: FTTH Council

The number of North American households connected directly into optical fiber networks grew by 13 percent over the past year, indicating that telecommunications companies of all sizes are continuing to upgrade to next-generation fiber to the home technologies, according to the Fiber-to-the-Home Council Americas.

The Council released figures prepared by the market analyst firm RVA LLC showing that 900,000 households across the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean were upgraded to FTTH service since April 2011, as the total number of North American homes with all-fiber connections surged past eight million. The figures showed that FTTH is now being offered to 19.3 million homes on the continent.

Download statistical charts.

About 95 percent of FTTH households are in the United States, which began to see a significant expansion of fiber deployment in 2004 when Verizon began upgrading to FTTH in much of its wireline footprint, but deployment in other North American countries is now beginning to rise. Canadian households now represent three percent of FTTH on the continent and the remaining two percent are in Mexico and the Caribbean. 

While Verizon continues to be by far the largest FTTH provider on the continent, the number of FTTH network operators in North America is nearing 1,000, as an increasing number of small and medium-sized incumbent telephone companies, most located in rural and small town areas, swap out their copper plant with fiber so they can offer faster Internet speeds and a video service to stay competitive and bring next-generation connectivity to their communities. Also building FTTH networks are a variety of competitive broadband companies, municipalities and public electric utilities. The vast majority of FTTH network operators serve fewer than 10,000 subscribers.

"The pure numbers of FTTH providers and their diversity is something that is uniquely North American. No other region of the world is seeing this," said Michael Render, President of RVA.

In a recent RVA survey, 58 percent of FTTH providers reported seeing increased local economic activity related to the availability of more robust, all-fiber networks they have deployed.

"The notion that the upgrade to FTTH can be a catalyst for economic development is precisely what is driving this enormous interest in high-speed fiber we are seeing at the community level across North America," said Heather Burnett Gold, President of the FTTH Council Americas. "Civic leaders in communities of all sizes have a sense that more bandwidth means more opportunities for economic progress."

"These latest numbers underscore that phenomenon in two ways - they show that smaller telecoms are continuing to upgrade to FTTH and that many are indeed seeing a positive economic impact in their communities after they deploy," she added.

The RVA survey also found that, on average, government supported FTTH stimulus projects are now 38 percent complete, with indications that many will start connecting subscribers this year. Environmental reviews and heavy demand for fiber optic cable were cited as reasons for the delays.

Meanwhile, the survey found growing activity among FTTH providers in fiber to the cell tower construction, with more than 1500 towers connected by small, single state providers in 2011.