Bristol, Tennessee Goes Super High Speed with 1 Gbps Broadband Network

Bristol, Tennesse/Paris, France - Bristol Tennessee Essential Services (BTES) and Alcatel-Lucent have announced the availability of 1 Gbps broadband service to all 33,000 residential and business electric customers of BTES.

Powered by Alcatel-Lucent’s GPON technology, Bristol’s network will accommodate speeds of up to 1 Gbps, which is ten times faster than the US Federal Communication Commission’s National Broadband Plan calling for 100 Mbps speeds for 100 million households nationwide by 2020. BTES’ OLTs connect to a 10 gigabit backbone via Alcatel-Lucent’s 7450 ESS switches and are aggregated through a pair of 7750 BSR routers to 10 gigabits of Internet capacity. BTES’ ONTs are capable of providing advanced IPTV video services along with traditional cable television, telephone and up to one gigabit per second of Internet bandwidth.

The 1 Gbps service has tremendous benefits for education, from elementary through university levels. For example, an elementary school located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains is combining SMART Board Technology and BTES’ gigabit service to offer virtual field trips to learn about other parts of the world. Recently, a class of 20 eight-year-old students “travelled” to Egypt to learn about the pyramids assisted by their own on-site tour guide.

"Bristol now has one of the fastest, totally built out networks in the United States. To give an example of how fast, you can download about two hours of video or upwards of 200 songs in just six seconds," said Dr. Michael Browder, CEO of BTES. "For our residential customers, that means one person in the household can download a movie, while another is playing an online game, while another is watching an HDTV program – all without slowing down any of the activities. For our business customers, it opens the way for transporting and accessing 'big data,' which is critical for economic development of the area."