Orange County Taps GSA to Bridge Digital Divide with ADTRAN Gigabit Solutions
July 14 2020 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
Deployment enhances quality of life and
economic development in rural communities where nearly half of
residents were underserved
ADTRAN®, Inc., (NASDAQ: ADTN), a leading provider of
next-generation innovative fiber and fiber extension broadband
access solutions, today announced through its Enabling Communities,
Connecting Lives program, that the Orange County Broadband
Authority (OCBA) selected the ADTRAN Total Access 5000 (TA5000)
fiber access platform to bring broadband internet services to its
community. When no other Internet Service Provider (ISP) would
service the rural region, OCBA partnered with ADTRAN utilizing the
General Services Administration (GSA) schedule for procurement. The
OCBA built its own Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) broadband network to
deliver affordable internet service to its residential and business
customers.
In 2019, the OCBA surveyed residents and businesses in the
county and noted that 92% of respondents were dissatisfied with
their current internet bandwidth speeds. Over 40% of students did
not have reliable access in their homes to complete schoolwork and
only 7.5% reported speeds greater than 25 Mbps—the threshold for
being considered underserved. In March 2020, COVID-19 escalated the
need to connect students, residents and businesses to high-speed,
reliable, affordable broadband and further supported the OCBA’s
decision to become its own ISP.
“Since the OCBA’s network is a greenfield deployment, we wanted
to minimize the number of network equipment vendors, allow for
future capacity and minimize the cost associated with operating the
network,” said Lewis Foster, Broadband Program Manager at the OCBA.
“With ADTRAN’s fiber access platform, we are able to leverage our
resources in the most efficient and cost-saving way while advancing
the economy and quality of life for subscribers in our area.”
Through its ReConnect program, the USDA awarded more than $744
million in funds through March 2020, to support more than 80
broadband projects benefiting more than 430,000 rural residents in
34 states. On June 25, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
(USDA) announced that it had partnered with the GSA to finalize a
revised Standard Form (SF-299) to make it applicable to support
rural broadband. The deployment by the OCBA is part of a GSA
contract in support of a rural broadband initiative.
The OCBA is leveraging the TA5000 fiber access platform to build
a highly efficient broadband access architecture using
high-capacity XGS-PON to offer internet connection speeds up to
10G. The OCBA is now able to better support remote learning and
work-from-home employees, as well as enable its residents to
connect to telehealth services and avoid commuting nearly an hour
to the nearest hospitals. With more than 20% of the population over
65, the OCBA saw this as a key demographic it wanted to better
serve with its new network. Additionally, these high-speed services
will attract new economic and recruiting advantages to the local
industrial park. The network can also
support local historical sites, like James Madison's Montpelier in
its efforts to digitally modernize archives.
“High-speed broadband is a vital resource no longer reserved for
urban environments. Communities across rural America are working to
bring the benefits of broadband to their neighborhoods, farms,
manufacturers, schools and businesses,” said Craig Stein, Vice
President of Sales for Americas and Head of Global Business
Development at ADTRAN. “It’s exciting to see utilities and
individual counties, like Orange County, Va., make it a priority to
bring affordable and reliable broadband services to their
customers. ADTRAN continues to support initiatives like this that
enable more communities across the U.S. to flourish as they connect
to new educational, healthcare and economic opportunities.”
About ADTRAN
ADTRAN, Inc. is a leading global provider of open, disaggregated
networking and communications equipment that enable voice, data,
video and internet communications across any network
infrastructure. From the cloud edge to the subscriber edge, ADTRAN
empowers communications service providers around the world to
manage and scale services that connect people, places and things.
ADTRAN solutions are currently in use by service providers, private
enterprises, government organizations and millions of individual
users worldwide. Find more at ADTRAN, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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Ashley Schulte 919-435-9112 ashley.schulte@adtran.com
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