Home Communications Inc. (HCI) is rolling out fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in rural Kansas using technology from Clearfield.
Clearfield said it is helping to manage the more than 600 miles of fiber to be deployed to all of HCI’s exchanges throughout nine cities, and ultimately serving approximately 1,800 homes.
Clearfield’s FieldSmart Fiber Distribution System (FxDS) panels will be used in HCI’s central office with strategically placed Fiber Scalability Center (FSC) PON cabinets equipped with Clearfield optical component splitting technology in the field.
HCI has been a customer of Clearfield. HCI chief technology officer Richard Baldwin cited several criteria for selecting Clearfield’s products, including ease of access, customer turn-up efficiency, cost-effectiveness and overall cleanliness of deployment.
“When you look at fiber panels with no fiber jumpers, initially it’s hard to determine which product is better,” he said. “After you run the fiber jumpers, it doesn’t take long to determine where manufacturing flaws exist. The fiber management design in the FieldSmart cabinet is far superior to others. Fiber jumpers stay organized and easy to manage from the first jumper to the last.”
HCI’s project is partially financed with broadband stimulus funding under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act.