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Rural Telco Enjoying a Ruckus

Wireless Eases Burden for Delivering Content to Multiple TVs

      

John Dillard, general manager-president of Rural LEC Monroe Telephone in Monroe, Ore., has figured a way to avoid a dirty job and still keep his customers happy.


“I crawled under a fair number of houses in my work life and I prefer not to do it again,” said Dillard, pointing out that it’s often necessary to go underground to wire multiple devices within a premises. Besides the creepy crawlies living there, Dillard has another problem with the job. “There are some houses that are now a challenge for me to crawl under. I imagine three or four days after I’d get stuck, I’d slim down enough to get through.”

The thing is, Monroe delivers digital TV to its 950 customers using a combination of fiber and ADSL2+ copper and if subscribers have more than one television set, somebody has to get under the house and snake those wires. That, said Dillard, is why Monroe is using Ruckus Wireless’ Wi-Fi gear to build home networks that deliver TV to three “clients” in the home for $6 a month with each additional device costing $3.

“We can go in with this and 30 minutes later we’re out of there,” he said. “We’ve saved a whole bunch of time and money.”

And a trip under the house.

Dillard estimates that 10 to 15 percent of his TV customers will use the wireless option, which he has already tested himself using a house he owns next door to his own.

“I was using Ruckus from my front room back to my back bedroom and I was recognizing the signal over at the other place on my laptop,” he recalled. “I grabbed the unit out of my bedroom and brought it over to my office and I had a good signal there. I now serve my back bedroom from my other house.”

To get there, the signal travels 150 feet through two glass walls and two regular walls, which, it might seem, would be an opportunity for a thief to step in an help himself to free television. It won’t happen, Dillard said.

“They would have to be allowed to get on by the access platform, which means they would have to mate with it, actually have to come in with a computer, be able to identify everything and then hack it,” he said.

Ruckus uses what it calls “smart Wi-Fi” technology to integrate with standard 802.11 Wi-Fi to move digital content around the house and better distribute a triple pay of voice, video and data services. Dillard is only using it for standard video but is confident there’s enough bandwidth available to transport high definition content.

Wireless, he emphasized, makes a lot of sense for rural providers delivering video, although said he would keep an eye on advancing wireline technologies as well.

“We understand there are some that work inside the house over the electrical system and we’ll probably try some of those,” he said. “We’ll take a look around and see if there’s something a customer can use that will work and we’ll do it.”

As long as it doesn’t mean crawling under the house.

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