MINNEAPOLIS -- Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) market leader Optical Solutions Inc. and North Dakota-based Dickey Rural Networks have entered into an agreement to provide direct fiber connections to several communities throughout a 2,500 square mile region of rural southeastern North Dakota.

Founded in 1950, Dickey Rural is a progressive telephone company with an impressive record of growth and expansion. In recent years the cooperative and its subsidiaries acquired a total of nine telephone exchanges from incumbent carriers, and secured rights to a cable-TV franchise. Overall, Dickey Rural serves 30 exchanges and 11,300 access lines with traditional class features, long distance, Internet and cable-TV.

"The copper plant in some of our newly acquired exchanges needed to be replaced, so it made sense to invest in state-of-the-art FTTP vs. an infrastructure that is on the verge of obsolescence due to its service limitations," said James Byerley, assistant general manager at Dickey Rural. "With FiberPath, we can deliver a range of voice, data and entertainment services today, and still have plenty of bandwidth left over for future applications or services."

Dickey Rural will deploy Optical Solutions' FiberPath 500, a complete ITU FSAN-compliant equipment and networking solution featuring Ethernet gigabit technology. FiberPath 500's gigabit passive optical network (GPON) offers unsurpassed bandwidth capacity and supports seamless migration from analog services to all-digital IP-based services.

"Optical Solutions has a proven track record in the field - their FiberPath solution is fully developed and compliant with GPON industry standards," Byerley said. "It also has built-in efficiencies to ease our transition to a next-generation network."

Optical Solutions Inc.