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Broadband Access
Broadband penetrates the heartland
SRT sets future path with Zhone Technologies
by Sean Buckley
If there was any word one could take to describe Minot, N.D.-based SRT Telecom, it would be "diverse."
SRT is diverse in two ways.
For one, SRT is a jack-of-all-trades carrier offering everything from basic
POTS, in addition to residential DSL broadband, business services,
wireless, and last but not least a traditional cable TV network.
At the same time, SRT’s geographic serving area is like two ends of the spectrum: both metro and remote rural customers.
To set a path for new packet and fiber-based services, while maintaining
its current customer base, SRT decided to deploy Zhone’s MALC and
zNID to extend Active Ethernet-based FTTH to its rural customer base.
With all of those network elements to manage, the main issue SRT
comes up against is its ability to allocate the right funds towards its
diversity of products.
“We’re running a voice, video and data and a wireless network,” says
Shawn Grosz, SRT’s director of network technology. “Every year, we
start our budget process around July, which we finish up in September.
Everyone is juggling for dollars each year when you have to keep
projects going, expansion, upgrades and maintenance costs.”
A targeted fiber approach
SRT’s diverse geography and service set lends itself to some unique challenges and opportunities.
When it comes to rolling out fiber to the home (FTTH), SRT is taking an opportunistic approach.
In its existing larger communities where it has an abundance of copper plant, SRT’s near-term strategy has been to build 6,000-foot customer serving areas with a focus on stretching the existing copper via ADSL2+, copper pair bonding and VDSL.
While not ruling out bringing fiber to its existing brownfield areas, at this point SRT’s fiber build is focused on its remote rural areas and greenfield applications over the same MALC platform it’s using to deliver DSL. (See Figure 1.)
Taking its name from the Souris River—a river that runs through its metro territory and stretches into the rural Drift Plains—SRT’s main challenge was its ability to expand broadband access to its rural customer base. In its rural areas, the distance between the homes and the CO made extending DSL service nearly impossible.
Grosz emphasized that the only connection these remote areas have to their network is lifeline voice and maybe some dial-up capabilities. What’s more, in many of these rural areas the copper had become so degraded even traditional voice was becoming problematic.
“We have targeted our rural areas with FTTH,” Grosz said. “I am not talking rural towns, but the very rural farmsteads where in some cases we have loops of 20 miles where broadband services are very difficult to reach. We have taken the approach of serving those customers that can’t be served with fiber.”
Future proof mentality
Despite the initial upfront expense, SRT has future proofed its network by installing fiber at each rural subscriber location.
At each customer site, SRT runs four fibers with a single fiber going to the customer’s house which is then home run back to the CO. By using small form pluggable-based optics, each customer gets its own fiber run.
“We kind of future proof ourselves to offer 100Mbps services to each subscriber … some of which are 20 miles out,” Grosz said. (See Figure 2.)
After installing 25 MALC units with the new Active Ethernet and the zNID gateway in December, SRT began a pilot rollout of its Active Ethernet fiber service initially to five customer sites.
SRT is now in the midst of Phase I of its upgrade project where it will extend voice and high speed data over fiber to 129 subscribers.
In July, SRT will begin phase II of its Active Ethernet deployment.
“Of course, in the process of doing the initial deployments it had to deal with gaining necessary rights of way, not to mention the cold weather.
Prior to pulling the trigger with its Active Ethernet deployment, SRT asked Zhone to make some minor adjustments to the outside zNID ONU platform to accommodate the environment in which it operates.
“We have an environment here where in January the temperature was actually minus 40 degrees, and the wind chill dropped that to 65 to 70 below,” Grosz said. “We have some unique environmental challenges here.”
Packet preparation
SRT’s future proof strategy with fiber lends itself nicely to support its future VoIP and IPTV service rollouts.
Leveraging Zhone for these upgrades, especially voice, made sense since the MALC has a GR.303 interface to interface with its existing Nortel DMS 500 Class 5 switch.
Interestingly enough, SRT’s relationship with Zhone actually has a Nortel connection. Zhone acquired Nortel’s Access Node product line, one that SRT is now fazing out of its network, in the late 1990s.
Initially designed to support its ADSL service base, which ultimately has grown to 12,000 subscribers, it is also using the same platform to support TDM-based voice.
At the customer premises, Zhone’s zNID outside gateway can not only provide higher speed data, but VoIP and video when ready.
Ultimately, SRT wants to transition to VoIP on its Nortel CS-2000 softswitch in 2009.
“By taking some steps at a time, it has allowed us to do an easier migration with a traditional TDM switch in the host office, but we do have a future plan to move that to our softswitch probably in 2009,” Grosz said. “That’s not really related to Zhone, it’s more related to the fact that we need to put SIP in our Nortel softswitch, which is today MGCP-based.”
And while Grosz recognizes that traditional voice pays the bills, he’s keen on offering enhanced interactive voice services not possible with a traditional TDM network. The ongoing migration to SIP could lend itself to new IPTV services such as on-screen TV calling or screen pops of sports scores.
“There’s a tremendous amount of opportunity once we move to some SIP services in the future,” he said.
At this point, SRT has no immediate IPTV plans. SRT is currently installing a new cable headend from Motorola to a digital RF cable plant to support 200 channels where it has cable TV franchises.
SRT expects the RF video upgrade to the communities where it offers traditional HFC-based video likely will take the rest of 2008 to finish.
That’s not to say SRT is not thinking about IPTV.
In the future, we plan to packetize that [cable TV] network in other areas, but we have not made a determination when that’s going to happen yet,” Grosz said. “We have not determined when we’re going to do IPTV; we’re just positioning our network.”
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