By Jim Pilgrim

As I was driving across the snow-swept Great Plains of South Dakota, roads were glazed with ice. I drove down Gulf Coast of Texas through Houston to the prettiest little island you’d ever see (Port Aransas, TX). After my short ferry ride to the island, the first thing I noticed was the houses were on stilts. Makes sense with the hurricanes and high water I’m sure that are not an uncommon occurrence there. What a beautiful and diverse country we are blessed to live in.

It got me thinking. I see that same diversity in FTTH builds. An architecture that works in a big city like Houston won’t fit in extremely rural areas across the country.

I had a great meeting with an Engineering company that deploys a unique architecture for rural areas of the US. Distributed splits and unequal power taps fit well in those areas. While 1×32 splitters in fiber distribution hubs rule the day in more densely populated areas.

Then, I was headed to North Carolina where their pine forests remind me of home. And where I grew up, there aren’t any houses on stilts.