April 10, 2002--Wamego Telecommunications Company, Inc., an independent local exchange carrier with three exchanges operating in the heart of the Flint Hills of Northeast Kansas, has awarded a contract to Optical Solutions Inc. (www.opticalsolutions.com) for systems that the carrier will use in a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network.
The deployment will feature Optical Solutions' FiberPath 400 equipment, which is based on a passive optical network (PON) architecture. The PON will replace Wamego's existing copper networks in portions of Wamego, KS. Construction is scheduled to begin early this spring and last throughout the summer and into the fall.
"We did our due-diligence with all the various wireline solutions, and we kept coming back to fiber-to-the-home," said Steve Sackrider, general manager of Wamego Telecommunications Company. "We figured if we're going to open the trench anyway, it doesn't make any sense to put in an infrastructure that has limited, short-term bandwidth capacity."
HunTel Engineering, which has overseen other Optical Solutions FTTH installations, will oversee the Wamego deployment. According to Rick Plugge, president of HunTel, the new FTTH network will replace an aging aerial cable system that could be damaged by ice, snow, or windstorms.