- Gigapower is actively building and operating open access networks in the U.S.
- AT&T, which is part of Gigapower, has also formed Forge Fiber 37, another open access fiber broadband company
- Industry leaders involved in open access will be attending a pre-conference workshop before Fiber Connect on Sunday
Gigapower, the joint venture between AT&T and Blackrock, has been kind of quiet, from a media perspective, for a while. But this week Fierce Network caught up with Amy Wheelus, chief technology and information officer with Gigapower, who said the company is very busy building open-access fiber broadband networks.
On Sunday, May 17, prior to the Fiber Connect conference next week in Orlando, Florida, there’s a pre-conference workshop focused on open access networks, and Wheelus will be speaking on a panel at the event.
Wheelus told Fierce that Gigapower is actively building and operating networks in eight different markets in seven states across the U.S.: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Florida. All of these Gigapower networks are outside of AT&T’s footprint, as that was the whole point for AT&T to enter the JV and build broadband outside of its own territory.
Although Gigapower isn’t divulging how many route miles of fiber broadband it’s built, the company has a goal to ultimately pass 1.5 million customer locations.
So far, the company has only announced three ISPs on its open access networks. AT&T is (obviously) the anchor tenant, and it’s also signed up Flume and Dojo Networks.
Gigapower has an interconnection office in each of its markets for its ISPs to connect. “We have a very clean separation between the network and the service layer,” Wheelus said. “I only provide the pipe, basically, and then the ISP is responsible for all the internet service, all the Layer 3 traditional telecom layer service that rides on top of that. The ISP owns the customer.”
COS has a lot of customers in the U.S. and Canada
The sponsor of the Sunday event is COS Systems, a Swedish company that began doing standardized OSS/BSS for open access networks in the Nordic country. The company was founded in 2011 to meet the demand for open access networks that were being formed by Swedish municipalities. It works with more than 50 ISPs on Swedish networks.
Isak Finer, chief revenue officer at COS Systems, said most of the company’s customers these days are in the U.S. and Canada.
“Open access is expanding like wildfire currently, and it's driven by the Tier 1s, so AT&T, Verizon, T Mobile,” said Finer. “I think people are starting to realize, if you have built a network and you have a 30% take rate, the economics aren't great. And if someone is coming in and building another network on top of it and hoping to get 30% that is going to be very difficult. So instead of over-building and just wasting money, people are understanding it makes more sense to sort of share this infrastructure.”
Open access standardization
One topic the participants in Sunday’s open access event will be discussing is standardization of processes to make it easy for many different ISPs to operate on the same infrastructure, similar to what COS provides.
Wheelus said standardization was really important for Gigapower. “Our story is really about building momentum, and we're doing that through standardization,” she said. The company has standardized how it onboards and interacts with ISPs, so that it’s kind of a rinse-and-repeat model that can be used in different geographies.
Gigapower is not using COS for its standardized platform. Rather, it’s using software that was born in AT&T Labs, tapping TM Forum APIs that allow for interconnection and for all the OSS/BSS functions required for fiber providers.
“Anybody that can consume a TM Forum standard API can connect very quickly and easily with us,” said Wheelus.
Forged Fiber 37
There’s an interesting wrinkle in AT&T’s work in the open access realm.
In February AT&T acquired the mass market fiber business of Lumen Technologies, and it placed these assets in a holding company that was temporarily called NetworkCo, but has since been renamed Forged Fiber 37.
According to an AT&T press release about the Lumen mass market assets, AT&T plans to soon sell partial ownership of Forged Fiber 37 to an equity partner, very similar to its joint venture with Blackrock for the Gigapower JV. Upon closing a transaction with an equity partner, Forged Fiber 37 plans to “operate as a wholesale commercial open access platform, providing fiber access services to AT&T as the anchor tenant,” according to the announcement.
It’s not yet known what kind of OSS/BSS platform Forged Fiber 37 will use.
Too many standards for open access?
Asked if there can be too many different types of OSS/BSS platforms for open access networks, Wheelus said there are already a few including COS’s and Gigapower’s, and she said Ubiquity has its own platform as well.
“There will be an evolution over time,” she said, adding that new technologies or businesses usually have multiple standards at the beginning and then over time they evolve into a single standard. The good news is with software, it’s a lot easier to merge standards than it used to be in a proprietary hardware-based world.
Mikael Philipsson, CEO at COS Systems, said there’s a committee within ATIS that is working on open access standardization. “That will actually lower the barrier for new ISPs coming in, and so that will be a huge shift in open access to take off even more,” he said.