Recently formed service provider Brightspeed is gearing up for the start later this year of a $2 billion network upgrade that will bring 10G XGS-PON and other technologies to its customers – once it has them. In the meantime, the company has been lining up vendors.
Brightspeed said that it has begun “design and construction preparation” and announced four companies with which it will work. Brightspeed will serve more than 6 million addresses in mostly suburban and rural areas of 20 states when it officially acquires Lumen Technologies’ local exchange carrier business in those states in a deal that is expected to close later this year.
Brightspeed plans to upgrade as many as 3 million addresses during the next five years. The work announced today is being conducted in North Carolina, where the company is headquartered. That preparation, as well as the builds that will follow, is based on FTTP via Optical Distribution Network (ODN) technologies and integrated software, the company says.
Brightspeed Vendors
The companies working on the first implementation are previously announced KGPCo (supply chain and logistics) and newly announced Corning (Evolv terminals and Pushloc connectors); Calix Incorporated (cloud platforms and 10G XGS-PON systems); Dycom Industries Inc. (design and construction services) and IQGeo Group (geospatial software solution).
“Given our collective decades of experience with previous network builds, the Brightspeed leadership team knows what it takes to deploy fiber at an ambitious scale,” Brightspeed chief operating officer Tom Maguire said in a press release about the Brightspeed vendors. “Technology has evolved greatly since the early days of fiber. We are hitting the ground running here in North Carolina with a technical architecture that leapfrogs even the most current state of FTTP networks.”
The acquisition from Lumen is valued at $7.5 billion. Lumen will retain its ILEC business in 16 states, where it also plans to invest in fiber broadband.
Updated to state that initial work is occurring in North Carolina, the state where Brightspeed is headquartered.
