Dayton, Oregon to Become a 10-Gig City

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In a matter of mere months, Dayton, Oregon will become the West Coast’s first 10-gigabit broadband city. The community is using this ultra-fast broadband capability to build an innovation ecosystem across schools, non-profit organizations, local businesses and government entities.

The service will come from local provider OnlineNW using technology from ADTRAN. As CivSource reported in March, the company started running 10-gigabit broadband service trials using a small testbed including utility companies and small internet service providers. Dayton will be the first citywide implementation of the technology.

The push for 10-gig service came after OnlineNW teamed up with Innovate Oregon and the Dayton school district to create Innovate Dayton – a program focused on fostering change and reimagining how local teachers educate and local students learn via creative problem solving and critical thinking. The result has been the development of an agile learning environment supplemented by real-world experience and community engagement opportunities for Dayton students from local companies and wineries. In order to take Innovate Dayton’s makerspace to the next level, educators wanted to become a gigabit city based on the successes seen in other high profile gig-cities like Chattanooga, Tennessee. Then, Thompson Morrison, Director, Business Development OnlineNW, tells CivSource that they found ADTRAN’s 10-gig capability and decided to future-proof the network.

“What we want to do is make Dayton a model for other rural cities and show our young people that they don’t have to leave to find high tech jobs. Instead, they can start here and maybe develop their own companies with service they aren’t going to get even in the big cities,” Morrison says.

While the 10GB network infrastructure was initially created to support the Innovate Dayton effort in the schools, OnlineNW also saw a unique opportunity to enable Gigabit broadband service for residents and local businesses via ADTRAN’s 10G PON solution. OnlineNW has set up a revenue sharing agreement with the Dayton public schools so that they will receive a percentage of the subscriber premiums in order to help fund agile learning environments and other educational expenses. This strategic relationship was a catalyst to enabling ultra-fast broadband for the community as a whole.

OnlineNW has also had conversations with the surrounding communities and policy makers at the state level about how to achieve a similar network throughout Oregon.

The 10-gigabit service is a Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) offering based on XGS-PON architecture. XGS-PON has emerged as a faster way of getting next generation broadband technology to market while standards boards finish work on NG-PON2. Led by ADTRAN, XGS-PON is an emerging ITU 10G PON standard that bridges the gap between today’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) technologies and NG-PON2. The technology uses existing fiber infrastructure which can make it more cost effective for providers. ADTRAN claims that its technology will double the usable life span of a fiber network regardless of how fast the markets broadband traffic usage grows.

ADTRAN makes its 10-gig technology available as a white label service, which enables providers like OnlineNW to set up a network and start offering it to local subscribers.

“This wouldn’t have been possible a year ago, it wouldn’t even have been possible three months ago,” Morrison adds. “The economics of these new developments mean that we’ve been able to take a 5-6 year deployment plan and trim it down to 6 months.”