In an interview with The Guardian on Friday, Andre Foster, vice president of information technology at Cable Bahamas Ltd., explained that the technology would allow the company to extend its existing fiber infrastructure directly to the home or office providing video and high-speed Internet services as well as other telecommunication services.
“It allows us to kind of continue to push the envelope as far as being able to provide advanced to the home services,” he said.
Mr. Foster explained that they are simply field-testing the technology from this particular company.
“We’re looking at this vendor and seeing how well this vendor’s equipment performs in our environment. If it’s successful we’ll see what it takes to do a full launch of the services,” he said.
During the testing phase, the company will examine the technology in approximately 10 sites and has already completed the necessary work in seven of these locations.
“We’ve chosen certain areas in Nassau,” Mr. Foster said. “Right now the locations are out west, there’s a few location on the eastern end of the island and I think we’re looking for a location out south also.”
According to Mr. Foster, Cable Bahamas looked at several firms offering similar technology but chose C-Cor because they were much move advanced than the other companies. “C-Cor seems to have the head start on the technology and they have a very good very versatile and robust system,” he said. “But certainly we are looking at other products and evaluating those also. They seem to be the leader of the pack.”
Mr. Foster further noted that Cable Bahamas engineers constantly examine the industry looking for new technology that can leverage the company’s existing infrastructure.
“Fiber to the home and fiber to the business is something that we’d always envisioned would be a requirement for telecommunications service in the future,” he said. “The products are now getting to a point where they’re very cost effective and that’s kind of what has pushed us towards doing this trial because we can see that there is some economic benefit for Bahamians to have this technology and the costs are not so great.”
Mr. Foster noted that when the company institutes the service, it might be difficult to provide the service to all the family islands. He identified specific islands that the service would most likely be targeted towards. “Certainly in Abaco, Eleuthera, Nassau and Grand Bahama, we’ll definitely be looking at launching in those markets… It wouldn’t mean every home in The Bahamas would have fiber going into it but certainly we would select certain areas where there would be a greater need for high speed data or advanced video services that we could leverage this infrastructure for.”
Mr. Foster noted that while a fee scheduled for this service has not been worked out as yet, typically new services of this kind would require an upfront fee. “In this particular case this technology does not really require any changes for video services and doesn’t require equipment for Internet services (and) there would not be an uplift charge from our basic CATV services to something like this,” Mr. Foster said. He continued that a customer premise box would be required for inside the home but the majority of the cost for this may be absorbed by Cable Bahamas. “We typically absorb most of that cost, again we don’t know what the cost will be overall so there may be like an installation charge but obviously it wouldn’t be very expensive. It would be in line with what we currently charge.”
C-COR’s FTTmaX platform is an end-to-end fiber solution that leverages the company’s Passive Optical Network (PON) technology, and Gigabit connectivity to provide high-capacity bandwidth as well as a simpler, more efficient, and less expensive network access for transporting voice, video, and data to the home or business over fiber optic Networks. The FTTmaX system uses the PON approach to address the last mile of the communications infrastructure from the service provider’s central office or head end directly into business or customer locations, a local loop that is currently a bandwidth bottleneck between metro-core systems and the end-user.
By Martella Matthews, The Nassau Guardian
