Northeast Louisiana Telephone picks Calix to upgrade services, deliver IPTV to subscribers using broadband stimulus money

Independent and locally owned Northeast Louisiana Telephone in Collinston, La. Is using part of an $8.1 million low-interest loan and a grant of $4.3 million from federal stimulus funds to upgrade its existing copper network to fiber and, in the process, will be offering high-speed Internet and IPTV to the tune of 300-plus channels to its roughly 1,000 subscribers.

NLT selected Petaluma, Calif.-based Calix (NYSE: CALX) and it Unified Access portfolio to bring advanced Active Ethernet solutions to help it bring fiber to its customers in Morehouse Parish, La. The package is uses standards-based fiber access network interconnected via 10 gigabit per second Ethernet rings. It will deliver IPTV services, residential and business data services capable of delivering up to 1 Gbps to each premises, and VOIP while reducing maintenance and operational expenses.

"The Broadband Stimulus program gave us the opportunity to start with a clean slate and build the network that would best serve the long term needs of our customers while providing the operations efficiencies we needed for
sustainability," said Mike George, the telco's president and general manager. "We knew from the start that Active Ethernet was the technology that we wanted to deploy--the challenge was finding a solution that offered the modularity, flexibility, and capacity we needed to balance our service and operational requirements."

NLT plans to pull fiber and deploy services throughout Morehouse Parish, a rural area dotted with large farms. The company says work on the project, which should take about three years to complete, already has begun.

The incumbent local voice provider has been operating since 1946.

For more:
- see this release

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