City of Sandy Uses OFS Professional Services To Build FTTH Using OFS FOX Solution® Home and Business

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- FTTH Conference, Booth 401 -- OFS, a leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of innovative fiber optic network products and solutions and the City of Sandy announce a fully underground Fiber to the Home (FTTH) network build using OFS' Professional Services to bring super high speed connectivity to businesses, institutions, and residents throughout the community of 10,000 citizens near Portland, Oregon.

The City of Sandy serves as the gateway to Mt. Hood and several recreation opportunities that the area offers.  The City has been operating an Internet Service Provider (ISP), known as SandyNet, for the past 10 years using a combination of fiber access for businesses, WiFi and resold DSL.  For the last three years, the City leadership investigated bringing FTTH to their citizens, but lacked a cost effective solution in a business structure that the City could accept.  Various options were considered, including outsourcing to local construction firms as well as a private company leasing the network and selling services back to the city. However none of these options proved satisfactory to the City.  The community wanted to see a fully underground build for the network, which proved challenging due to the lot layout for boring optical cable pathways to over 3,200 residential homes.

OFS' Professional Services assembled a complete team of business partners to create a complete FTTH outside plant network for the City. OFS provided an efficient network design using OFS' FOX Solution for Home and Business that met the City's budget by reducing labor and material while providing ultra-high speed network capabilities. The OFS team also arranged financing with a business partner to help the City with a flexible payment schedule that could be balanced with expected revenue streams. In continuing the network roll-out process, OFS also developed and provided growth options for the network to quickly adapt to future demand. With an efficient network roll out process from design to deployment, OFS' Professional Services helped make FTTH deployment feasible for the City of Sandy.

The City's provides services to a total of 3,242 premises locations. OFS is providing a customized FOX Solution Home and Business for Sandy that includes OFS' new AllWave®+ fiber in over 200,000 feet of Fortex™ DT Light Armor cable and MiDia® FX+ cable, OFS compact ruggedized splitter solution, and 980 terminals from which OFS' new EZ-Bend® tonable drop cables are installed to the premises. OFS' EZ-Bend rugged 3 mm cables and the EZ-Bend® InvisiLight™ solution make the final connection to the indoor optical network terminal (ONT).

"We wanted to provide our community with a high capacity FTTH network utilizing an affordable, expandable network design.  The OFS team, composed of applications engineers, network architects, and professional services providers, put together a complete solution.  The network efficiently meets our needs and anticipates the demands on our system now and into the future," said Seth Atkinson, City Manager of the City of Sandy.

"It has been a great pleasure working with the City of Sandy as their leadership and staff strongly believe in the benefits of building the right FTTH network. Starting from their experience operating a community based wireless ISP for the past 10 years, they will fulfill their vision of a fiber connected community using new services that improve quality of life and provide a foundation for fiber fueled economic development for years to come," said Geoff Thumma, Business Development Manager, OFS Professional Services. 

About OFS Professional Services OFS' Professional Services helps customers achieve their goals through network design, detailed engineering, construction, and project management, utilizing OFS FOX Solution Home and Business.  The OFS Professional Services team has collectively overseen the engineering and construction of FTTH to over 1M single family homes and over 150,000 apartment and business units.

About OFS

OFS is a world-leading designer, manufacturer and provider of optical fiber, optical fiber cable, connectivity, FTTx and specialty photonics solutions.  Our marketing, sales, manufacturing and research teams provide forward-looking, innovative products and solutions in areas including Telecommunications, Medicine, Industrial Automation, Sensing, Government, Aerospace and Defense applications. We provide reliable, cost effective optical solutions to enable our customers to meet the needs of today's and tomorrow's digital and energy consumers and businesses.

OFS' corporate lineage dates back to 1876 and includes technology powerhouses such as AT&T and Lucent Technologies. Today, OFS is owned by Furukawa Electric, a multi-billion dollar global leader in optical communications.

For more information, please visit www.ofsoptics.com.

SOURCE OFS