GPON market leader Optical Solutions Inc. announced that Santa Rosa Telephone Cooperative of Vernon, Texas, has initiated services with the FiberPath 500 GPON system in the first of several competitive fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments planned over the next five years.

According to Santa Rosa General Manger Dennis Raines, residents and businesses in the community of Aspermont are not hesitating to switch to the CLEC's advanced service package, which includes multiple lines of fiber-fed voice, high-speed data up to 1.5 Mbps, and the ultimate video offering - IPTV. "We expect to achieve 80-90 percent take rates inside of 24 months," Raines said.

Santa Rosa is no stranger to competitive overbuilding. By the end of the decade, if all goes as planned, the aggressive cooperative will have fortified its 13 ILEC exchanges with an additional 21 CLEC exchanges - all based on fiber. "Up until Aspermont we had been working with a fiber-to-the-node system, but then we began looking at the numbers for fiber all the way to the home, and we saw with OSI's GPON we could get far greater bandwidth and future-proofing capacity for roughly the same cost."

Optical Solutions' FiberPath 500 system is the only gigabit passive optical network (GPON) platform in North America that is widely deployed and available today. GPON offers unparalleled bandwidth for delivery of advanced voice services, symmetrical high-speed data service and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV). The FiberPath 500 system is fully compliant with ITU FSAN standards, and is the industry frontrunner in live IPTV deployments.

"We are pleased to be part of Santa Rosa's aggressive plans to deliver GPON-based FTTH services to underserved communities in Texas," said Optical Solutions President and CEO Mike Dagenais. "As this customer and others have experienced, the business case they can make for GPON leads to FTTH being the right decision whether it's a greenfield or brownfield application."