Several months ago your's truly (Curtis Dean) filled out an online form volunteering to be a beta tester for Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite internet offering. I wasn't expecting much out of it, but I actually received an invitation this week, clicked the link, and went to their website. As you will note from the small text, Starlink is "targeting coverage in your area in mid to late 2021". I would love to demo Starlink (although not as a replacement for my FTTH service), but I wasn't ready to send Elon $99 quite yet for the honor. Starlink recently notified the FCC that they now have 10,000 users connected to their low earth orbit satellite fleet. The company now has over 1,000 satellites in orbit and hope to eventually have a fleet of over 11,000 satellites. If any of our Broadband Bytes readers have actually had a chance to experience Starlink, drop me a note. cdean@broadbandaction.com.
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Two of Iowa's first municipal telecommunications utilities-and one of its most recent projects-have joined CBAN as Provider Members. Cedar Falls Utilities began offering broadband services over their hybrid fiber-coaxial network (HFC) in the late 1990's. As customer demand for internet grew, CFU rebuilt their entire community with fiber-to-the-home in the 2010's. And just last year, CFU became one of the first networks in the country to offer 10 Gbps services to any customer that wanted or needed it. Manning Municipal Utilities has offered telecommunications even longer than Cedar Falls, having built and operated a legacy cable TV system in the 1980's. MMU rebuilt their network to HFC in the early 2000's, and are just completing their rebuild to fiber. Waverly Utilities operates a fiber-to-the-home network in their northeast Iowa community. The project was launched in 2016 - 16 years after voters approved a municipal telecommunications referendum. Waverly continues to grow its customer base at a steady pace. These municipal broadband providers are great role models for any community looking to bring better broadband to their citizens. They show that communities large and small can take control of their future by investing in vital infrastructure. Welcome aboard!
One of CBAN's big goals for 2021 was to grow our membership across all classifications. And we're excited to have Tii Technologies join CBAN as an Associate Member! Tii Technologies is a leader in providing the communications industry with fiber and copper solutions for over 55 years. They support the ever-changing demands of today's broadband networks and provide world-class product development and manufacturing based upon customer specific requirements. Markets Served:
Thank you to Tii Technologies and all our great Associate Members for their support of CBAN's mission!
GPON (gigabit passive optical networks) technology, deployed by most fiber-to-the-home networks, is capable of 2.5 Gbps bandwidth to a group of customers served by the same splitter. XGS-PON, the next generation PON technology, can do 10 Gbps and has been deployed by several operators, including Cedar Falls Utilities. Now Nokia Bell Labs (Nokia is a CBAN Associate Member) has announced a lab trial of 100 Gbps PON technology. The trial took place in a Vodafone lab in Germany last week. Nokia's innovation is capable of delivering speeds of up to 100 Gbps on a single wavelength, ten times the best current PON version. It's still just a trial, of course, and field implementation is likely several years away. But the ability to do 100 Gbps over a single PON wavelength could represent the next wave (pun intended) of fiber network innovation. While a developing technology called NG-PON2 promises to deliver 40 Gbps, it requires 4 wavelengths bonded together. That significantly increases the complexity of the lasers at both the fiber hub and the customer premise.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Noon CST Anti-Municipal Broadband Groups Guests Christopher Mitchell (Institute for Local Self-Reliance) and Doug Dawson (CCG Consulting) will join us for a discussion of the big (often dark) money behind efforts to block municipal broadband in America. CLICK HERE to register (FREE!) |
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