Our team has supported Chelan County PUD with its Fiber Acceleration Program for the past four years, performing planning, fielding, engineering design, and construction support services.
Chelan County PUD has been building an open access, fiber-optic broadband network for its customer owners throughout the county for more than 20 years. The network allows all connected customer owners access to multiple gigabit/gigabit-plus internet service providers (ISP) via a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to each home or business.
The build-out has been broken up into two programs. The Fiber Acceleration Program focuses on large distribution areas and works to capture as many customer owners as possible within those areas, while the Infill Program focuses on the harder-to-reach areas with fewer customers. Since its inception, Chelan County PUD has been designing and building this network on its own, but in 2021 it sought a partner to help accelerate its build-out while other key initiatives ramped up. This is when our team came into the fold.
The program leverages our team’s experience in distribution design and construction to analyze existing fielding data and conduct make-ready engineering. It also capitalizes on our team’s experience with telecommunication design and construction to design the fiber-optic network. In this way, we have enabled the deployment of 70 route miles of fiber-optic cable reaching a potential 1,400 customers. As of early 2024, we have supported seven distribution areas and have analyzed over 1,200 distribution poles.
We also helped Chelan County PUD clean up property rights, incorporated distribution line reconductoring and upgrades, reduced high tree-trimming corridors by transitioning both power and fiber underground, assisted with network planning from the serving network node to the FDT, and coordinated with their wildfire mitigation program. Looking into the next several years, we will continue our support for the remaining FDTs while also supporting the Infill Program moving forward.