FiberLight Empowers Nextlink
ATLANTA – MARCH 16, 2020 – FiberLight, LLC, a fiber infrastructure provider with more than 20 years of construction experience building mission-critical, high-bandwidth networks, announces that it has been chosen as the lit network service provider of choice by Nextlink Internet across its Texas network. Nextlink is one of the largest wireless internet service providers (WISPs) in the United States. The company delivers high-speed internet and voice services throughout the Southcentral U.S. — including Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska with plans for 2020 expansion across Iowa and Illinois — to residential, business, K-12, higher learning and governmental agencies.
Nextlink had an existing 10GB network ring in place through FiberLight, but the company needed to expand its network infrastructure with 70 additional fiber-fed towers. This would ensure that it could deliver carrier-grade internet service via fixed wireless and fiber to the home (FTTH) in rural and underserved areas across Texas. In order to maintain its robust active tower construction strategy and meet an evolving demand for services, Nextlink contracted FiberLight to deploy an enhanced 100GB lit core, powered by Ciena equipment, with the availability to build in laterals to serve each new additional tower. The deployed laterals to the tower are rate limited to 1GB but were constructed to easily scale to 10GB without additional equipment purchase or installation, offering shorter lead times for capacity upgrades. FiberLight’s core ring network deployment with enhanced redundancy averts the need for linear shots out to the towers and protects service to support greater reliability for end-users.
“As a recipient of CAF II FCC funding, we were very excited to be able to complete this fiber project and expand our geographic coverage and network capacity to serve areas in rural Texas that were in need of more robust connectivity and enhanced broadband options,” comments Bill Baker, CEO of Nextlink. “We allied with FiberLight because of how simple their partnership made it to deploy this solution, but also because of their strategic relationship with Ciena, which enabled us to easily purchase equipment through FiberLight to complete this build. Now, our entire Texas network infrastructure is empowered and positioned for continued growth.”
“We’re proud to be Nextlink’s partner of choice for its enhanced network core and increased tower deployment. Our dense and diverse network in Texas is ideal for delivering these highly valuable and much-needed connectivity opportunities to rural regions,” comments Marc Dyman, Chief Revenue Officer of FiberLight. “The services and equipment that the company purchased can easily be grown and transitioned down the line to dark fiber, or even a managed dark fiber solution, as their network grows and becomes more complex, so we look forward to continuing to build on our partnership and enhance their success.”
FiberLight, through a partnership with Ciena, now offers a Managed Dark Fiber Network (MDFN) solution that enables WISP and enterprise customers to enhance their capabilities with dark fiber as they grow their network, but without the extensive in-house IT or capital resources traditionally required to run such a network. Dark fiber delivers augmented flexibility, cost-efficacy, control, scalability and agility with virtually unlimited bandwidth and on-demand control over capacity. FiberLight’s managed dark fiber solution enables companies to outsource the complexity of managing the network while still garnering the same advantages, leveraging flexible financing options and keeping in-house resources and personnel trained on core business goals.
FiberLight offers 20 years of dedicated expertise designing, building, maintaining and monitoring large-scale, custom high-capacity fiber infrastructure in some of the country’s most rapidly growing areas.
About Nextlink:
Nextlink Internet, based in Hudson Oaks, Texas, is a provider of high-speed internet and voice services to residential, business, institutional and government customers in mostly rural and small-town areas, with an emphasis on excellent customer service. The company uses a mix of “fixed wireless” as well as fiber-optic network technologies to deliver internet access. For residential plans, speed plans go as high as 100 megabits per second (Mbps), with no data caps or limits; business customers can design custom links as high as 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). Since its founding in 2012, Nextlink has attracted approximately 40,000 broadband subscribers with its focus on quality and customer service. In 2018, Nextlink won a competitive bid for $281 million in support over 10 years from the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Connect America Fund (CAF), which will help the company deploy broadband services to more than 100,000 homes and businesses across six states.
About FiberLight:
FiberLight designs, builds and deploys mission-critical high bandwidth networks to ignite our client’s digital transformation. With 14,000 route miles of fiber networks and 78,000 pre-qualified near-net buildings, FiberLight operates in over 30 metropolitan areas in the U.S. Our service portfolio includes high-capacity Ethernet and Wave Transport Services, Cloud Connect, Dedicated Internet Access, Dark Fiber and Wireless Backhaul serving domestic and international telecom companies, wireless, wireline, cable and cloud providers as well as key players across enterprise, government and education. For more information, visit www.fiberlight.com.