Forthnet, a competitive telco based in Greece, launched a pilot Fiber to the Home (FTTH) service in Athens over which it will offer a triple play bundle to residential and business subscribers.
Leveraging ADTRAN's (Nasdaq: ADTN) GPON (Gigabit passive optical network) equipment, the service provider is serving 2,000 homes with FTTH-based services in the municipality of Nea.
The ADTRAN GPON solution allows a simplified migration of Forthnet's customer base to the new FTTH services, while enabling capacity and bandwidth scale for future demands of new media-rich services.
With the ADTRAN GPON gear, Forthnet said it will be able to more easily migrate their existing customer base to the new FTTH-based services and scale to access whatever new over-the-top (OTT) and their own bandwidth-hungry services they develop in-house.
"By taking this approach, we are not only enabling the Metropolitan area of Athens to make the necessary technology leap, but are also giving local residents and businesses the opportunity to use new bandwidth hungry applications without fear of reduced performance or latency," said Giannis Kavaklis, Chief Commercial Director at Forthnet, in a release announcing the deployment. "ADTRAN's FTTH solution not only gives us the bandwidth required today, but also provides a simple migration path forward that helps us to stay competitive in our market in the long term."
This FTTH network will complement its ongoing DSL service offerings, which includes a bundle of sports, movies and entertainment, in addition to voice services. Currently, Forthnet offers its triple play bundle over traditional DSL and it recently launched its new VDSL service.
Like fellow providers OTE and Wind, Forthnet is offering up to 50 Mbps data on its VDSL-based service. Eligible customers will have to pay an additional €10.00 ($13.00) to add VDSL services to existing ADSL2+ offerings.
While the new FTTH service will up Forthnet's competitive footing, it also provides a vote of confidence for ADTRAN as they look to establish a greater presence in the European broadband market. In addition to their own internal efforts, the vendor immediately broadened its international presence when it purchased Nokia Siemens Networks' access division last year.
For more;
- see the release
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