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.”
For related articles, visit the Business Topic Center.
For more information on high-speed transmission systems and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.
To stay abreast of fiber network deployments, subscribe to Lightwave’s Service Providers and Datacom/Data Center newsletters.