By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
Salisbury keeps moving ahead on establishing its cable utility.
Mike Crowell, director of broadband services for the city, says things are on schedule with about six different components gradually coming together.
Four items are on Salisbury City Council’s agenda today related to the $30 million-plus project.
Council will consider awarding a $2 million contract to Zhone for the purchase of GPON equipment and services for the fiber-optic network.
Crowell says GPON “allows us to talk to the customer” and involves the installation of optical line terminals and optical network terminals. Council also will consider awarding a $278,680 contract to ETI Software Solutions for the purchase of OSS/BSS software for the network.
It also will discuss purchasing IPTV software and equipment.
Meanwhile, Shelco of Winston-Salem has started construction on the head-end/customer service center off South Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue.
The building is being constructed in two phases, and the crucial head-end facility will come first. The schedule calls for it to be completed by the end of January with the customer service center to follow that.
For now, Crowell and his small staff are working out of the AFLAC building off Klumac Road, within walking distance of the head-end construction site.
Peregrine Systems of Denver, Colo., has been working at a remote site in Granite Quarry, installing a satellite dish, local antennas and the electronics to connect the site to the head-end facility.
Once the head-end construction is finished, Peregrine will assemble all the racks and run power to them off a 48-volt DC system, much like telephone companies use. All the receivers and encoders follow, and the company will install those, followed by the middleware and core routing.
Crowell said progress is being made through a national communications cooperative in coming up with a program lineup for the cable television arm of the utility. Efforts will be made to include all local stations, including the Charlotte, High Point, Winston-Salem and Greensboro areas, Crowell says.
Salisbury’s fiber-optic system will offer telephone, television and Internet services in direct competition with incumbent providers such as Time Warner and AT&T.
Much of the underground installation of fiber-optic cable has been completed.
One snag in the building of the fiber-optic network has been the delays from incumbent providers in moving their equipment on the utility poles to make room for Salisbury’s pole attachments, Crowell says.
The installation of the cable underground and overhead will be 75 to 85 percent completed in the city by the time the head-end facility is ready, Crowell estimates. So far, 32 of the 68 LCP (Local Convergent Point) cabinets have been set in place.
The city essentially has been divided into 68 sections, each of which will have a cabinet.
Each cabinet will have the capacity to serve 288 homes, businesses, churches, schools and other institutions.
In all, the city is running some 250 miles of fiber-optic cable and will be using 6,600 Duke Energy and AT&T utility poles in the city alone.
Crowell says the city is still shooting to have an “alpha” test of the system with 20 to 25 people in March, followed by a “beta” test of 100 to 150 potential subscribers in April. The city hopes for a “controlled rollout” of the new utility next June.
Crowell says if 1,000 people signed up for services in the first week, for example, there is no way installers could get to that many subscribers right away, so the rollout will have to be controlled in some fashion.