Bristol, Tennessee Goes Super High-speed With 1 Gigabit Broadband Network

BRISTOL, Tenn. and PARIS, Nov. 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) and Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) today announced that 1 Gigabit broadband service is now available to all of BTES' 33,000 residential and business electric customers. 

Powered by Alcatel-Lucent's Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) technology, Bristol's network will accommodate speeds of up to 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps), which is 10 times faster than the FCC'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 Dr. Michael Browder, CEO of BTES. "For our residential customers, that means one person in the household can download a movie, while another is playing an online game, while another is watching an HDTV program – all without slowing down any of the activities. For our business customers, it opens the way for transporting and accessing 'big data', which is critical for economic development of the area."

One Gigabit service also has tremendous benefits for education, from elementary through university levels.  For example, an elementary school located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains is combining SMART Board Technology and BTES' Gigabit service to offer virtual field trips to learn about other parts of the world.  Recently, a classroom of 20 eight-year-olds "travelled" to Egypt to learn about the pyramids assisted by their own on-site tour guide. 

"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.  "Our long-time collaboration to bring this network to Bristol speaks volumes about the confidence they have in our technology, our expertise, our global leadership and our ability to help create one of the world's most advanced high-speed broadband access networks."

About BTES' 1 Gigabit network

Using 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. 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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