FTTH installation set for Fire Island

The western portion of Fire Island was devastatedduring Hurricane Sandy, and all of the landline network infrastructure was destroyed. Shortly thereafter, Verizon announced plans to replace the destroyed cabling systems, which included both voice and data lines, with Voice Link, a wireless voice service.After public outcry, Verizon has changed its plans and will now move forward with a fiber-to-the-home network installation, Long Island Newsday reported.

Rebuilding the network on Fire Island
As one of the Barrier Islands off the coast of the United States, Fire Island does not necessarily represent a core market for major telecom projects. The report explained that Verizon's efforts to install a basic voice network were not accepted by the local community, however, because the simple architecture was not equipped to meet local needs. Besides wanting data transmission capabilities to support internet use, local residents were also concerned that the wireless network configuration would not be reliable in emergency situations.

Tom Maguire, senior vice president for national operations support at Verizon, told the news source that the shift in strategy comes directly in response to customer demands.

"In today's competitive marketplace, it's all about making sure you can take care of customers," Maguire told Long Island Newsday. "Interestingly, on Fire Island, there is no place else, so we listened to our customers. So we think that fiber is the best course.It was pretty apparent that we wanted to do something beyond Voice Link and the wireless network, so we think that fiber is the best course."

According to the news source, representatives from the Fire Island community brought their case to the New Yorkstate Public Service Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. Verizon was the only carrier providing landline services in the location, so the initial decision to move to wireless created concern in the community. The new FTTH network, on the other hand, will give west Fire Island residents multiple voice, internet and television options.

Building FTTH networks efficiently
Maximizing installation efficiency is vital to installing FTTH infrastructure. FTTH networks do not always deliver immediate revenues, creating a situation in which telecoms must minimize costs during installation. This must be done while also ensuring network reliability to avoid excess maintenance costs. Fiber to Ethernet media conversion solutions can enable telecoms to build efficient FTTH networks without taking on excess costs to overcome compatibility issues. Because of this, media converters can play a vital role in supporting efficient FTTH installation.

Perle has an extensive range of Managed and Unmanaged Fiber Media Converters to extended copper-based Ethernet equipment over a fiber optic link, multimode to multimode and multimode to single mode fiber up to 160km.