Midco Communications Taps Clearfield® to Help Break Broadband Barriers by Topping Structures with Wireless Backhaul Solutions
December 01 2020 - 8:00AM
Business Wire
Deployment fuels rural Midwest region with
connectivity to support industries like farming and
manufacturing
Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLFD), the specialist
in fiber management for communication service providers, today
announced that Midco Communications (Midco) is utilizing its
Clearfield YOURx™ Flex Box, Clearview® Blue Cassette, FieldShield®
FLATdrop and fiber cables to cost effectively create higher
bandwidth point-to-point wireless backhaul connections in its
network. Clearfield and Midco collaborated to craft a unique
approach to bringing fiber from the base to the top of tall
structures such as grain elevators, grain legs and water towers to
serve as signal hand-off sites to provide broadband to the
communities it serves.
Midco serves more than 400,000 customers across Kansas,
Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. Its service
area reaches many rural communities and geographical locations that
are exposed to harsh natural environments such as blizzards and
high winds. To deliver broadband services, Midco needed a
connectivity approach to link places that could not be reached with
fiber today and equipment able to withstand the harsh outdoor
environments. By listening to Midco’s needs, including working with
components such as radios that were not specifically designed for
fiber, Clearfield was able to produce custom, future-proof
solutions that enabled Midco to place 24 fibers, nearly double the
quantity in a traditional deployment, to the top of existing
structures with one cable. To-date, Midco has installed
Clearfield’s fiber solutions at fifteen sites with plans to
continue deployment at additional sites, offering its subscribers
in rural and farming communities 100 Mbps connections and enabling
them to benefit from the lifestyle better broadband provides.
“Clearfield truly acted as a partner to Midco by listening to
the needs of our unique situation and providing custom solutions
that enabled us to address the need for fixed wireless access in
our service area,” said Jeremy Billings, GM-Regional Engineering at
Midco. “We set a goal of getting the fiber from the top of a tall
structure to the bottom in about 15 minutes, which seemed laughably
fast to other people. Despite this being an unusual deployment
scenario, Clearfield was able to cut that down goal to just five
minutes, helping us exceed our installation goal and more quickly
deliver services to customers within range.”
To meet the installation time goal, Clearfield’s YOURx Flex Box
arrived at Midco with a 300 foot FieldShield FLATdrop pigtail. At
the top of the structure, the Flex Box was mounted on a rail. From
the Flex Box, the duplex assembly was installed onto the structure
to the individual radios; one cable per radio. The radio side of
the assembly used a specially designed protective sleeve and a
collar to ensure network integrity. By using this approach and
preconfigured solutions, Clearfield was able to complete this
deployment in two hours, saving money and speeding time to service
availability.
“Clearfield is proud to help service providers, like Midco,
strengthen its service offerings to meet the growing broadband
demands of subscribers regardless of location,” said Kevin Morgan,
Chief Marketing Officer at Clearfield. “Rural America requires
reliable connectivity just as much as urban areas in today’s
environment. Our work with Midco is a demonstration of our
commitment to helping service providers reduce the high costs
associated with deploying, managing, protecting and scaling a fiber
optic network to deliver the mobile, residential and business
services customers require.”
To learn more about this deployment please visit the associated
case study or www.SeeClearfield.com.
About Clearfield, Inc.
Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLFD) designs, manufactures and
distributes fiber optic management, protection and delivery
products for communications networks. Our “fiber to anywhere”
platform serves the unique requirements of leading incumbent local
exchange carriers (traditional carriers), competitive local
exchange carriers (alternative carriers), and MSO/cable TV
companies, while also catering to the broadband needs of the
utility/municipality, enterprise, data center and military markets.
Headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, Clearfield deploys more than a
million fiber ports each year. For more information, visit
www.SeeClearfield.com
About Midco
Founded in 1931, Midco is the leading provider of internet and
networking, voice, data center, cable TV, phone, home security and
advertising services in the Midwest. More than 400,000 residential
and business customers count on Midco services in 342 communities
in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
Visit Midco.com to learn more about Midco and how the company gives
back to the communities it serves.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201201005179/en/
Katie Brown Connect2 Communications for Clearfield, Inc.
803.507.2437 katie@connect2comm.com
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