King Township Fibre Optic Broadband Expansion

completed

This project is designed to provide next generation Fibre To The Home (FTTH) service to rural homes along a fibre optic trunk cable recently built by Vianet running north/south from Barrie to Vaughn through King Township along Sideroad 10 and Jane Street, as well as new lateral fibre optic builds into small rural subdivisions along the route. The homes and businesses identified for service in the proposal are ones deemed to have no current access to wired broadband service (cable or DSL) in areas currently serviced by Vianet’s wireless service with the majority of customers limited to 1.5 Mbps upstream and 0.256 Mbps downstream As a partner and general contractor for the 60+ km trunk cable, Vianet was in a unique position to add both additional fibre strands and extra conduit for future FTTH distribution pullbacks when the trunk cable was being designed. The idea behind investing the small incremental costs in increasing the fibre count and adding additional conduits was to address the rural underserved homes and businesses along the route in the future. Anybody experienced with rural broadband struggles is familiar with the complaint that a homeowner cannot get any decent broadband despite fibre optic cable running right in front of their home. This is due to the fact that in those situations the fibre optic cable was built for backbone purposes and not for FTTH breakouts and distribution. This project will address that common complaint by taking advantage of forward thinking and incremental investment by Vianet to make the installed backbone fibre capable of FTTH distribution. Through an additional investment of $3.3M more than 1000 homes, farms and business without access to wired broadband service will get Gigabit capable FTTH.