Alcatel-Lucent, Bolt Fiber Optic Services to bring 1 Gbps broadband to northeast Oklahoma

Bolt Fiber Optic Services, Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative' s fiber to the home (FTTH) subsidiary, has tapped Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) to be its GPON vendor for its 1 Gbps network that will deliver a mix of data, third-party VoIP and TV services to rural northeastern Oklahoma residents.

The service provider said it will be able to support services for the 30,000 cooperative members that reside in a mix of rural communities, tribal areas and a lake resort area. Set to begin offering 1 Gbps service in the fourth quarter of 2014, Bolt will complete the rollout in April 2017.

For this project, Alcatel-Lucent is providing four key solutions: the 7360 Intelligent Services Access Manager, 5520 Access Management System, Triple Play Express and Video Systems Integration solutions.

In addition to providing necessary hardware and software, Alcatel-Lucent is serving as the systems integrator for the project, providing architecture, design, engineering and installation services and third-party solutions for the headend, OSS/BSS, fiber mapping and Mediaroom middleware and software for IPTV services.

Bolt is just one of many municipal FTTH deployments where Alcatel-Lucent has played a major role. It also serves as the GPON supplier for a number of U.S. and international players, including EPB Chattanooga, Bristol Tennessee Essential Services, Hong Kong Broadband Network and ZON Multimedia in Portugal.

Similar to other municipal broadband projects like Mass Broadband 123 and Leverett, Mass' FTTH proposal, the goal of the Bolt project is on economic development and attracting more people to the rural communities it serves.

"The population is going to continue to go away, the towns are going to continue to become ghost towns if we don't change the pattern and start bringing in some good paying jobs and technology and broadband is key to getting those jobs coming to northeast Oklahoma," said Sheila Allgood, RECtec manager and BOLT fiber optic services manager, in a video talking about the new network.

For more:
- see the release

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