Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company moves forward with Calix Active Ethernet solutions

Leverages Calix E7 ESAP and broad ONT portfolio to enable delivery of IPTV and other advanced broadband services over Active Ethernet to thousands of subscribers

PETALUMA, CA — Calix (NYSE: CALX) today announced that Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company, an award winner in Round One of the Broadband Initiatives Program of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has formally selected the Calix Unified Access portfolio to bring advanced Active Ethernet (AE) solutions to thousands of premises in Morehouse Parish, Louisiana. The company plans to move “Fiber Forward,” replacing its aging copper infrastructure with an advanced, standards-based fiber access network interconnected via 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet rings. The network is designed to deliver IPTV services, residential and business data services capable of delivering up to 1 Gbps to each premises, and reliable voice over IP (VOIP) services, greatly increasing services capabilities while reducing ongoing maintenance and operational expenses.

“The Broadband Stimulus program gave us the opportunity to start with a clean slate and build the network that would best serve the long term needs of our customers while providing the operations efficiencies we needed for sustainability,” said Mike George, president and general manager of Northeast Louisiana Telephone Company. “We knew from the start that Active Ethernet was the technology that we wanted to deploy – the challenge was finding a solution that offered the modularity, flexibility, and capacity we needed to balance our service and operational requirements. The Calix E7 and the extensive Calix ONT portfolio are ideally suited to our strategic needs, and we look forward to delivering a host of advanced services to the residents of Morehouse Parish for years to come.”

Moving “Fiber Forward” with Calix – Using Broadband Stimulus Dollars for Strategic Investment

Leveraging $12.4 million in Broadband Stimulus grants and loans, Northeast Louisiana Telephone plans to pull fiber and deploy Active Ethernet services throughout Morehouse Parish, a rural area dotted with large farms. In conjunction with this fiber access buildout, they also plan to deploy a new digital IPTV headend as well as a Metaswitch softswitch for SIP voice over IP (VOIP) services. Enabling these services will be a variety of Calix platforms and products, including the E7 Ethernet Service Access Platform (ESAP), a wide range of Calix P-Series ONTs specifically tailored for residential and business needs, and E5-110 Ethernet Service Access Nodes (ESANs) for copper services.

“In the North American market, Active Ethernet and GPON have emerged as the two preferred protocols for delivering advanced fiber access services, and increasingly service providers moving ‘Fiber Forward’ are deploying both technology options in their networks to meet the unique needs of their subscribers,” said John Colvin, vice president of field operations at Calix. “Calix fiber access solutions can natively support both Active Ethernet and GPON, with both technologies supported from the same optical line terminal (OLT) and each optical network terminal (ONT) capable of auto-detecting the technology that optimally meets the subscribers’ needs. Calix excels at providing highly flexible access solutions that allow service providers to optimally address their subscriber requirements, and we look forward to assisting Northeast Louisiana Telephone in making its deployment a success.”