Firms look at fiber as Net’s future

There's a laser in John Zeiler's office that beams light into about 1,000 homes and businesses. He's not a mad scientist. He's an Internet service provider -- a modern one.

Zeiler is the general manager at Pinnacle Communications in Lavaca -- a city of 2,400 east of Fort Smith. His company provides Internet and phone services to city residents via fiber-optic cable.

That sort of cable transmits pulses of light instead of pulses of electricity to provide the fastest Internet speeds available. Companies have been using the technology to extend Internet into neighborhoods, but then usually switch to copper cables to connect homes with central-neighborhood switch boxes.

"Copper was not going to have the speed to move us into the future," Zeiler said. "Our owners have always been forward-looking, and they decided years ago to invest in fiber."

Traditional cable is capable of much faster speeds than most customers choose to buy, but experts say ever-increasing data use -- mostly attributed to video watching -- may require service providers to replace copper with fiber in the future.

That's why some smaller service providers and providers running service to areas without networks in place are using fiber. That's also why companies that have spent years and millions of dollars on existing networks are keen to improve them to match growing demand.

Pinnacle, which spent about $6.5 million to upgrade its network, decided to make the upgrade sooner rather than later.

Residents in Lavaca now have access to gigabit Internet, which is about 200 times faster than the average Arkansan's connection. It's the same speed Internet that Fort Smith competed for in 2010 when it tried and failed to lure Google Fiber into the city.

The service costs $199 per month and launched Oct. 16. Zeiler expects most subscribers to stick with the slower, cheaper speeds but sees the service becoming more popular as time goes on.

There are plans to build an osteopathic medical school nearby, and professors and doctors are going to need a lot of data to work from home. Families with lots of children and lots of devices use lots of data. There are many possibilities, Zeiler said.

In central Arkansas, about 9 percent of residents have access to that kind of Internet speed and 10 percent of residents have access to fiber cabling in their homes, according to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. In Northwest Arkansas, one-tenth of 1 percent of residents have access to that high-speed Internet, and 4.7 percent have access to fiber cabling in their homes.

"There's some areas of the state that it shocks you how great Internet they have," said Sam Walls, president of Connect Arkansas. "It's an interesting industry. It's an interesting thought process the providers go through where they make their investments."

Growing networks

Many companies in Arkansas that have extensive networks already in place say they can achieve competitive speeds with the copper wires already in the ground.

Jonesboro-based Ritter Communications serves about 45,000 customers in northeast and north-central Arkansas as well as west Tennessee. Susan Christian, vice president of marketing, said the company has worked hard to improve the infrastructure.

Ritter typically has fiber cables out to neighborhoods and then traditional coaxial cables from neighborhood boxes into homes.

"We're continuing to evaluate the fiber-to-the-home concept as we move forward. Right now we're getting speeds up to 100 megs, which is a very high speed for what folks need," she said. "As time moves on, that investment may be necessary. It's supply and demand."

Ritter does offer up to 10 gigabits per second -- 10,000 megabits per second -- to business customers in Jonesboro on a fiber network.

If the company were to start from scratch, the network might be all fiber, Christian said. But the company has already built, rebuilt and upgraded its network as well as bought other networks to assemble its business -- an expensive, never-ending process.

"With any technological investment, things move and change so fast," she said. "So with what it can provide, we would have loved to have fiber to the home. But from a cost standpoint, I don't think we would have done that."

Similarly, Little Rock-based Windstream Holdings Inc. has an extensive network in place that includes copper and fiber cables. The company, which operates across the country, primarily serves business customers in Arkansas, but also provides broadband, phone and digital TV services to rural areas of the state.

Scott Walters, Windstream's area manager of operations for Arkansas, said networking choices have to be made on a case-by-case basis. Terrain, construction costs, cable costs, hardware costs and customer demand have to be taken into account.

"In most cases fiber is the first option, and copper is close behind that," he said. "I wouldn't say there's one solution because there are so many options out there. Right now, and this happens across all [telecommunication companies], fiber to the premises is the biggest chatter right now to speak of."

But if Windstream wants to expand to a new area and there's copper already nearby, putting in a redundant fiber network might not make business sense. So expanding the copper networks and increasing their speeds is the better decision in many cases, he said.

"That's being explored because there's so much investment out there that's in place in the copper world," he said. "There's a lot of opportunity there."

Fiber for the future

Danville-based Arkwest Communications provides fiber and DSL connections in Yell, Perry and Scott counties. Tom May, plant manager, said the company has about 4,700 subscribers. About 55 percent are on the fiber network.

On Wednesday, the company was awarded a $24 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand and upgrade its fiber network.

"We're in the process of converting it all to fiber," he said. "It's something that we're proud of."

Arkwest offers digital television, phone and Web access -- all on those fiber lines. Internet speeds range from 1.5 megabits per second to 50 megabits per second on the fiber network. Most opt for the cheapest, slowest speed, May said.

"Fiber is, I think, the future-proof answer," he said. "Bandwidth is -- I'm not going to say unlimited -- but you can get an enormous amount of bandwidth to the customer."

Heather Burnett Gold, president of the Fiber to the Home Council Americas, said Verizon, which pushed its FiOS-branded fiber network into metropolitan areas, proved that the technology made sense where people are clumped close together. But rural telecommunications companies are starting to prove that the technology can work in areas where people are more spread out.

Besides the speed, the fact that it won't require continuous upgrades to stay competitive makes business sense, she said.

"I think the beauty of deploying fiber to the home is you're building it once, and it really does make your community future-proof," she said. "The cable companies certainly are delivering greater bandwidth in competition to carriers that have deployed fiber. At this point, from what I understand, there's a limit to how much it can be expanded."