Calix E7 selected by Broadband Stimulus award winners Wiktel and Reedsburg

Initiatives to deliver advanced GPON and DSL services to a combined 18,000 residents and 1,600 businesses

PETALUMA, CA ―Calix, Inc. (NYSE: CALX) today announced that Broadband Stimulus award winners Wikstrom Telephone Company, Inc. (Wiktel) and Reedsburg Utility Commission (Reedsburg) have selected the Calix Unified Access portfolio to address their respective “Fiber Forward” initiatives. The awards, which include plant engineering, materials, labor, and other costs, including access equipment, will together result in over $14.9 million dollars of grants, loans, and private investment. Both awards will be used to deploy additional services in “unserved” and “underserved” rural areas of northwestern Minnesota and central Wisconsin, bringing much needed broadband access services and the opportunity for future economic development to each respective region.

“The six rural communities targeted by this project sit in northwest Minnesota, one of the most remote areas of the state and an area with limited broadband connectivity today,” said Alan Lundeen, plant manager at Wiktel. “The residents and businesses of this region, however, have a thirst and economic need for broadband services that is just as strong as those in the big cities. With the help of Calix and its Unified Access portfolio, we will build one of the nation’s most advanced broadband networks across our region, providing our subscribers with superior broadband services, and our community with an extraordinary foundation for economic development.”

“We’ve partnered with Calix to pull ’Fiber Forward’ in our south central Wisconsin community before, and can testify to the transformation advantages that fiber access and advanced broadband services can bring to a region,” said Dave Mickonowicz, general manager of Reedsburg. “That said, until the Broadband Stimulus program was announced, there were rural areas of our community that we just couldn’t afford to reach, creating a digital divide in our own backyard. With this award, and advanced technology from long-time partner Calix, these rural areas adjacent to our existing fiber access serving areas will leapfrog from limited dial-up internet access to a network capable of delivering up to one gigabit per second to every home or business, and in so doing open a world of broadband opportunity to thousands of residents and hundreds of businesses.”

The rural subscribers included in these two initiatives in Minnesota and Wisconsin will be served via a combination of fiber and copper access technologies, including gigabit passive optical network (GPON), point-to-point gigabit Ethernet (GE), ten-gigabit Ethernet (10GE) transport, very-high speed digital subscriber line two (VDSL2), and asymmetric digital subscriber line two plus (ADSL2+) technologies. The networks being deployed are expected to be capable of meeting the broadband demands of each respective community for the next decade.

* Wiktel will be using its funds, which consist of a $5.2 million grant and a $2.2 million loan, to build an advanced GPON and VDSL2/ADSL2+ network to an estimated 12,000 people, 1,500 businesses, and 83 community institutions in six rural communities in Kittson, Marshall and Roseau Counties. The network, which will connect predominantly “underserved” residences and businesses, will be engineered around a Calix E7 Ethernet Service Access Platform (ESAP) 10GE ring, and utilize both the E7 and E5-100 Ethernet Service Access Node (ESAN) platforms to provide advanced broadband services to thousands of homes and businesses. Wiktel will also leverage the Calix 720GE family of optical network terminals (ONTs) for extensive flexibility in delivering GPON or point-to-point Ethernet services, specialized business services, as well as the ability to move to video services in the future.
* Reedsburg will use a $5.2 million grant and $2.3 million in private investment to extend advanced communications services to an estimated 6,000 residents in rural areas that currently have limited dial-up Internet access. The E7 ESAP will be utilized to enable a 10GE ring, for GE aggregation, and for delivering an advanced bundle of services over GPON that will include symmetrical Internet services, digital TV, and reliable voice. The 700GE family of ONTs will be deployed at an estimated 2,400 homes and 310 businesses, laying the foundation for deployment flexibility between GPON and Active Ethernet (AE) services as well as advanced business services.

With today’s announcement, aggregate Calix vendor selections by Broadband Stimulus winners for “last mile” Broadband Initiative Program award has now reached fifteen different projects representing approximately $196 million in Stimulus-related grants, loans, and private investment for plant engineering, materials, labor, and other costs, including access equipment.

About Calix

Calix is a leading provider in North America of broadband communications access systems and software for copper- and fiber- based network architectures that enable communications service providers to connect to their residential and business subscribers. Calix has shipped seven million ports of its Unified Access Infrastructure portfolio to more than 500 North American and international customers, whose networks serve over 40 million subscriber lines in total.