Northeast Missouri Rural Telephone has chosen Occam’s BLC 6000 multiservice access platform and ON 2300 series optical network terminals to upgrade the second largest of its 14 exchanges from copper to fiber.

As part of its FTTH deployment strategy, Northeast Missouri will initially upgrade their Memphis service area from aerial copper to buried fiber. Additional service areas will be upgraded in the future. “Our first initiative was to get the wires buried,” said David Riddle, Northeast Missouri’s Plant Superintendent. “And if we were going to bury them, it made sense to upgrade to fiber. We considered other vendors but Occam’s reputation and commitment to rural broadband providers impacted our decision.”

Extending Gigabit Ethernet from the Memphis central office to the subscriber via fiber ensures that Northeast Missouri’s broadband network will support future needs as subscriber demands for bandwidth increase. In addition, a Gigabit Ethernet FTTH network provides a bi-directional solution. “We know Occam’s innovative solutions will easily support us as we evolve our broadband network for the future,” said Riddle. “We have an increasing number of subscribers playing online games and sharing files. Upstream bandwidth has become as important as downstream. Internet traffic is increasingly two-way.”

Northeast Missouri offers subscribers local and long distance telephone and high speed Internet services. It is a founding member of the Missouri Network Alliance, a fiber transport network that extends throughout much of the state. Northeast Missouri receives its IPTV signal through the Alliance and has been offering IPTV to a growing number of subscribers for approximately 10 months.