Highlighting innovation and craft-friendly design across all deployment architectures

MINNEAPOLIS – February 4, 2025 – Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ:CLFD), the leader in community broadband fiber connectivity, today announced the launch of a comprehensive distributed TAP architecture solution to its portfolio, further expanding deployment options for fiber network providers. The new offering highlights Clearfield’s commitment to providing flexible, scalable and craft-friendly solutions that simplify fiber deployment in any environment, including rural areas, urban settings, and multi-dwelling units (MDUs), while addressing the growing demand for reliable, high-speed broadband.

"Clearfield’s strength lies in its ability to innovate across all deployment architectures and distributed TAP is no exception,” said Anis Khemakhem, Chief Marketing Officer at Clearfield. "With our continued focus on evolving deployment architectures, we're meeting the unique demands of diverse deployment environments while delivering the same craft-friendly, reliable solutions that customers expect from Clearfield, making it easier than ever to deliver broadband to underserved communities and beyond.”

Clearfield’s expanded portfolio now supports a wider range of fiber to the home deployment topologies including Centralized Split, Distributed Split, Home Run and Optical TAP. While there are advantages and limitations of each approach, Distributed TAP addresses environments that include:

• Challenging Environments: With distributed TAP solutions integrated into several product platforms, including OSP access terminals and MDU wall boxes, Clearfield Distributed TAP solutions can tackle diverse deployment challenges, from rural and urban landscapes to densely packed business parks and MDU’s.
• Rural Environments: Choosing distributed TAP solutions for rural deployments supports lean deployment objectives. This can lower up-front material and splicing costs, but at the expense of losing network upgradability, service restoral and engineering complexity.
• Urban and MDU Environments: With shorter overall fiber lengths in urban and MDU environments, the impact of using distributed TAP components on the optical loss budget will be lesser than rural environments, resulting in the ability to achieve lower up-front costs without sacrificing signal strength to end customers.

As demand for fiber connectivity continues to rise, Clearfield remains at the forefront of innovation, adapting its portfolio to meet evolving deployment requirements. All architectures have inherent advantages and disadvantages. Clearfield partners with network providers to assess and guide them to a best-in-class network that meets their deployment goals.

Further insights into deployment architectures and the role of distributed TAP within Clearfield’s portfolio can be found in the white paper “Fiber to the Home Optical Network Architecture Choices.”
For more information about Clearfield’s distributed TAP architecture and its applications, visit www.SeeClearfield.com.

About Clearfield, Inc.
Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLFD) designs, manufactures, and distributes fiber optic management, protection, and delivery solutions that play a critical role in enabling broadband operators to close the digital divide. Our labor lite, craft-friendly platform is leveraged by community broadband, MSOs, incumbent service providers, ISPs, data centers, military, municipalities, and coops - from homes passed to homes connected faster and more efficiently. Headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, Clearfield deploys more than a million fiber ports each year.