Metro Bytes: Wilcon, North Star, Fibrant, Comcast

As we slide into Labor Day weekend and the end of summer, here’s a selection of items from the metro from this week that are worth a look:

In southern California, Wilcon picked up a key education customer. Orange County’s Chapman University will be using the company’s fiber network to hook up the company’s campuses, vastly increasing the bandwidth available to its faculty and students. We had Wilcon’s Jon DeLuca here for an Industry Spotlight to start 2015, looking at the company’s growth plans.

Following its purchase by Arvig Enterprises, Minnesota’s North Star Fiber says it is in the midst of a significant fiber buildout. They plan to install fiber into over 5000 MDU locations throughout the Minneapolis/St.Paul region, including St. Cloud and Rochester to the south. That’s about double the condo and apartments they were talking about hooking up just a month or two ago.

Also on the residential side, Calix says it is partnering with Fibrant to bring 10G to residents of Salisbury, North Carolina. No, that 10G wasnt a misprint. They’re offering 1G and 10G to anybody, whether residential or enterprise, but they don’t really expect too many 10G residential subscriptions right now of course. Fibrant is using point-to-point Ethernet today, planning to switch to nextgen PON technology next year. Catawba College has signed on already for a 10G connection.

And finally, Comcast Business found some extra hospitality to hook up in San Francisco. The Hilton San Francisco Union Square hotel has upgraded its connectivity from two 500Mbps links to two 1Gbps links, upgradeable to 10Gbps in the future. They want to be able to support up to 6,000 guests simultaneously, although if all 6000 are watching Netflix I think they’re going to need those 10G pipes pretty darn soon.

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Categories: Cable · Ethernet · FTTH · Metro fiber