Imagine not having reliable electricity to keep your closest hospital running, your work humming and all the many other uses that we take for granted. When the lights go out, so does our patience and productivity.
Electric co-operatives…private, non-profit, member-owned electric utilities…often provide this needed electricity to rural and underserved areas.
But how to keep the lights on for electric co-ops?
Fiber broadband is an increasingly important way. Grid modernization drives the need for higher bandwidth, faster speeds and greater reliability. To anticipate future communication requirements, many co-ops are pushing fiber deeper into their networks, closer to the equipment with which they need to communicate.
At Clearfield®, we’re proud to be part of this modernization. As the industry leader in craft-friendly fiber optic management and connectivity solutions, we’re fiber termination experts. Regardless of the application or environment, we offer electrical co-ops a level of technical expertise that’s built on decades of experience.
No two fiber deployments are exactly alike. By listening to our customers, we learned that traditional methods of broadband connectivity can be costly and lack a common platform to use across the entire network…from the datacenter/substation all the way to the final drop. This inspired us to develop the Clearview® family of cassettes. The cassette becomes the multiplier, in 12-fiber increments, to get to the port count desired. The Clearfield family of cassettes is the only building block platform that scales across the entire network…from datacenter to substation to the customer premises.
In contrast to pre-terminating a cabinet with a stub and pulling this stub back to the splicing area, the Clearview Cassette uniquely allows splicing within the cassette itself. This greatly minimizes labor from both deployment and maintenance perspectives. Electric co-op customers appreciate how our cassette platform is designed for ease of expansion…helping them to grow their network broadly and cost effectively.
If you want to know more about how we can keep the lights on for electric co-ops, reach out to Clearfield. We’re happy to tell you more about fiber solutions that are easy, fast and cost-effective to deploy.
By Michael Wood
Product Marketing Manager for Clearfield’s Fiber Active Cabinet line, Michael Wood also manages the industry certification training program and advanced marketing work related to federal broadband funding programs. Michael began his career as Process Engineer, designing and manufacturing fiber optic cables for Anaconda-Ericsson. Later, he was Fiber Optic Product Manager at Belden (for fiber cable products in the Local Area Network market), Pirelli (for fiber cable products in the CATV market), Hubbell (for structured cabling systems) and Legrand (for the Ortronics network infrastructure solutions). Before joining Clearfield, Michael was Global Product Manager at nVent’s (Hoffman and Schroff) Data Center & Networking Solutions initiative…developing and producing the direct-to-chip thermal management solutions for high-performance computing data centers. Michael holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of Notre Dame and is a Certified Fiber Optic Technician (CFOT).