Telecom Lead Asia: Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) and Alcatel-Lucent have launched 1 Gigabit broadband service to 33,000 residential and business electric customers of BTES.

Alcatel-Lucent’s offering gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology. Bristol’s network will accommodate speeds of up to one gigabit-per-second (Gbps), which is ten times faster than the US Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan calling for 100 Mbps speeds for 100 million households nationwide by 2020.

“Bristol now has one of the fastest, totally built out networks in the United States. To give an example of how fast, you can download about two hours of video or upwards of 200 songs in just six seconds,” said Michael Browder, CEO of BTES.

“Alcatel-Lucent and BTES have a long-standing relationship, and are committed to putting the Bristol community at the forefront of high-speed, high-tech communications for consumers, schools and businesses alike,” said Robert Vrij, president of Alcatel-Lucent’s Americas region and head of Global Strategic Alliances.

Leveraging Alcatel-Lucent’s GPON-enabled 7342 ISAM FTTU optical line terminals (OLTs) and optical network terminals (ONTs), BTES is able to provide voice, video and data services up to one gigabit per second.

Moreover, BTES’ OLTs connect to a 10 gigabit backbone via Alcatel-Lucent’s 7450 ESS switches and are aggregated through a pair of 7750 BSR routers to 10 gigabits of Internet capacity. BTES’ ONTs are capable of providing advanced IPTV video services along with traditional cable television, telephone and up to one gigabit per second of Internet bandwidth.

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