Tennessee Utility Upgrades to 25G

Approaching 25 years of operations, FiberNET is getting an anniversary upgrade that includes 25G PON on the edge for homes and businesses, core network of 100 Gbps, and long-haul connectivity of up to 800 Gbps. In the meantime, the network supports the Morristown Utilities Commission (MUC) electric division’s Smart Grid with the ability to directly read meters, real-time monitoring of voltage, and demand response programs to shave peak electric loads. Advanced metering is also deployed for reading the municipality’s water meters.

“We’re homegrown,” said Jordan Partin, Telecom Manager, Morristown Utilities. “Everyone that works at FiberNET is from this area. We take customer service very seriously. The same person you may see at the grocery store one evening is the same person that comes to your house the next day and fixes your internet or TV problem. It’s very, very close knit.”

MUC has a long history of supporting its community with its inception dating back to 1887 when the city voted to purchase the local power business and make it a not-for-profit municipality utility. The first studies for internet took place in 2003 with approval to provide services in 2004, with construction starting in 2005 and the first customer installed in May 2006 onto the FiberNET service. Expansion to 25G PON is being done using Nokia’s 7360 XGS technology incorporating their Altiplano management system while partnering with ETI Software for provisioning.

Other services the fiber network supports include IPTV, voice, hosted phone and PBX, IoT and some off-site storage and colocation services. Partin noted that the storage business which was launched in 2015 has been declining since more people and businesses are taking advantage of cloud solutions. Once the upgrades are completed, FiberNET plans to offer 2 Gbps and 5 Gbps services and evaluate the demand for higher speeds from residential and business customers.

Today, FiberNET passes between 14,000 and 15,000 homes with a high take rate, substantially higher than its initial projections that estimated only 4,800 total internet customers.

“We’ve well surpassed that. I think we’ve got 67%, 68% take rate, which is very good for us,” said Partin. “We are somewhat landlocked, meaning that some of our neighboring utilities such as Appalachian Electric, Holston Electric are right on our border, and they do a lot of the same stuff that we’re doing now, but there’s a lot of area within our current [service territory] that hasn’t been developed. So, we are expanding. We’ve done probably 25 projects a year for the last two years. Those will be development projects, 100 lot home developments, 300-unit apartment complexes, things like that within our footprint.”

At the heart of FiberNET’s upgrade to 25G PON is Nokia’s XGS-PON hardware. Source: Morristown Utilities Commission.

Leveraging the utility’s existing pole network, FiberNET is approximately 65% aerial fiber and around 35% underground, but those percentages are gradually shifting. New developments prefer underground deployments of utilities, so the fiber typically follows the route of how power arrives.

Larger businesses that FiberNET supports in the area include the public school system, automotive parts manufacturing; lawnmower transmission and transaxle manufacturing; and aerospace and commercial transport industries. They also connect the east and west offices of several area businesses through virtual private LAN services, so IT departments can seamlessly manage both locations, regardless of where staff are.

“No matter who it is, large business or small business, we try to walk them through what they might need as much as we can,” said Partin. “We realize it’s not always an easy decision for internet services or they may not know what they need. We try to think of those things they might need, and that’s our community mindset, just getting them connected to their world.”