SPOTLIGHT
Bridging the Rural Divide: How Technetix rOLT is Transforming Fibre Access By Ade Brittain, VP of Customer Insight and Innovation, Technetix
As we saw at our recent sell out event, SCTE ® Presents: Rural Fibre & The Last Mile, reaching those remote communities remains a significant challenge, but there are increasingly inventive solutions now available, depending on budget, landscape, access and population. Ade Brittain tells us what Technetix are doing to bridge the rural divide.
[Credit: Anna Dillon © ]
FTTH operators to connect hard-to- reach areas and addresses efficiently and economically. Sounds like this is a cost issue... Not just a scaled-down version of urban fibre build, rural FTTH present a different engineering and economic challenge. With more dispersion and more varied terrain, the likes of farms, isolated homes and country roads, works for fibre deployment can quickly become resource intensive. As a result, the cost to connect each home can be significantly higher than in towns and suburbs. Designed for centralised service to thousands of premises, traditional OLTs are poorly suited to these environments. Installations to serve low-density rural zones can give rise to large and underutilised infrastructure with unattractive ROI. This mismatch in scale drains capital, discouraging investment in rural areas.
What are the issues facing those in rural not spots? In today’s digital landscape, access to fast, reliable internet is essential and should no longer be seen as a luxury. Yet inconsistent connectivity - even lack of service altogether - is still true for some ultra-remote communities. Despite government-led initiatives to address digital disparity and underserved areas, FTTH operators overwhelmingly favour urban areas, prioritising cities and suburbs for faster ROI based on greater property density. Furthermore, well-intended initiatives served to reinforce the imbalance, rewarding operators on homes passed: not homes connected. The resulting rapid trunk deployments have proliferated the so-called ‘Swiss Cheese’ effect – holes in service provision when budget limits prevent fibre routes reaching isolated pockets of unserved premises. Built for rugged, scalable edge deployment, Technetix’ rOLT (remote OLT) is a compact solution that enables
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May 2025 Volume 47 No.2
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