Delivered over a 10-year period, Windstream has said it will use the funds to deliver fibre-to-the-home broadband services to more than 48,000 locations in that state of Georgia.
“This is an exciting opportunity to further expand our fibre network in Georgia, enabling us to bring gigabit-speed broadband to rural communities that would have been too expensive to serve without a public-private partnership,” said Michael Foor (pictured), Windstream’s vice president of state government affairs in Georgia.
The FCC’s RDOF Phase I aims at enabling infrastructure investment in unserved census blocks, defined as those blocks where no location receives at 25/3 Mbps in broadband speeds.
Windstream has already expanded its broadband access across Georgia over the past six years, investing more than $525 million. As a result, by the end of 2020 500,000 households had speeds of 25Mbps or higher.
In addition, during 2020 Windstream deployed gigabit speeds to 100,000 locations bringing the total in Georgia to 150,000.
“Partnerships are the key to deploying high-speed broadband in high-cost rural areas. That’s why Windstream has partnered with Colquitt EMC, Chattooga County, Allentown and others in the last year,” added Foor.
“We have ongoing discussions with additional community leaders and EMC’s and are actively seeking additional partnerships to accelerate fibre deployment and the related benefits for our communities.”
In related news, Windstream Wholesale recently completed a live network trial that successfully deployed 400G single-wavelength transmission over Windstream’s 1,027km network between Phoenix and Los Angeles.
The trial has been hailed as a real-world benchmark of 400G using Acacia Communications’ digital coherent optics technology, namely its 400G pluggable modules.
