With plans to build a fiber-to-the-home network that will bring high-speed, broadband services to residential customers, WINfirst (www.winfirst.com) today inked agreements worth $1 billion with Lucent Technologies (www.lucent.com) and Avaya (www.avaya.com). Lucent will provide $800 million worth of equipment, software and services over five years, while Avaya will provide data switching equipment valued at $200 million.
"We are building an entirely new fiber-optic network capable of breaking the last mile bottleneck and Internet logjams that are currently frustrating residential customers," says Jim Vaughn, WINfirst's chairman and CEO.
WINfirst plans to offer services that are 65 times faster than the typical 1.5 mbps high-speed connections offered today, enabling users to simultaneously download a DVD movie, view a sporting event from a web site, stream a digital home video to a relative over the Internet and hold multiple phone calls.
WINfirst will accomplish such feats by deploying an innovative optical access network that connects each home using dedicated fiber optic cable and equipment with lasers to send and receive information using IP and Fast Ethernet.
Bell Labs engineers developed two new products for WINfirst's network. The first is a network demarcation unit, which is attached to the outside of a customer's home, terminates the fiber connection and uses a laser to send and receive traffic over the network. The second is a residential Ethernet gateway, which is located inside the home and connects to PCs and telephones.
WINfirst already has regulatory approval to build networks in the Texas cities of Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio; as well as San Diego and Sacramento, Calif. The city of Portland, Ore., has already given WINfirst a network construction permit. And, franchise applications are pending in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Seattle and Oakland, Calif.
Lucent's NetworkCare Professional Services group will design, integrate and install the next-generation network in each of WINfirst's cities, starting with Dallas and Sacramento.
