FiberLight, LLC, a fiber infrastructure provider with over 20 years of experience building mission-critical, high-bandwidth networks, recently announced that it was chosen by Nextlink Internet — one of the largest wireless internet service providers (WISPs) in the United States — as its lit network service provider of choice across its Texas network. Nextlink delivers high-speed internet and voice services throughout Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska (with plans for 2020 expansion across Iowa and Illinois) to residential, business, K-12, higher learning and governmental agencies. 

To expand its network reach into new and underserved areas, Nextlink wanted to grow its network infrastructure to include 70 additional fiber-fed towers, ensuring that it could deliver  carrier-grade internet service via fixed wireless and fiber to the home (FTTH) across Texas. With an existing 10Gb network ring from FiberLight already in place, maintaining and expanding the robust active tower construction and its ability to meet evolving demand meant deploying an enhanced core. The new FiberLight core, powered by Ciena’s Waveserver Ai® platform, offers 100Gb lit capabilities with the ability to build in laterals for each additional tower. 

The deployed tower laterals are rate limited to 1Gb but can be easily scaled up to 10Gb without the need for additional equipment purchases or installation. This ensures shorter lead times for important capacity upgrades down the line. Furthermore, 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. 

“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.” 

“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.”

In collaboration with Ciena, FiberLight is offering a Managed Dark Fiber Network (MDFN) solution to enable WISP and enterprise customers to augment their capabilities with dark fiber, growing their network while averting the traditional needs for extensive in-house IT or capital resources. Dark fiber offers enhanced flexibility, cost efficacy, control, scalability and agility with virtually unlimited bandwidth and on-demand control over capacity. 

This managed solution allows companies to outsource the complexity of managing the network while still allowing enterprises to leverage key advantages and flexible financing options to keep in-house resources and personnel trained on core business goals. 

To learn more about FiberLight’s MDFN solution, please read the company’s press release here. 

To learn more about FiberLight, please visit www.fiberlight.com. 

To learn more about Nextlink, please visit www.nextlinkinternet.com.