American Fiber and DZS Team to Bring 10 Gig-Ready Hyper-Broadband Services to Central Illinois

Over 90 percent of residential and businesses subscribers in rural community taking gigabit services from innovative service provider

DASAN Zhone Solutions, Inc. (NSDQ: DZSI or “DZS”), a leading enabler of the emerging hyper-connected, hyper-broadband world, is proud to announce that American Fiber Network, Inc. (“American Fiber“) is bringing 10 gig-ready broadband services to rural central Illinois. After breaking ground on their fiber overbuild in early 2019, American Fiber was rapidly able to begin offering Teutopolis residents voice, video, and data services at speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (1 Gbps) just a few months later. Today, hundreds of residential and business customers have subscribed to hyper-broadband services across this fiber optic infrastructure, with over 90 percent taking gigabit services thereby making Teutopolis one of the nation’s most connected communities.  DZS and its elite reseller Baltic Networks USA (Baltic Networks) have played a key role in enabling this success from the start, providing the terabit-capacity MXK-F platform and a broad portfolio of Wi-Fi capable zNID residential gateways that have enabled this world-class network to deliver highly differentiated services ten times faster than competitors.

"In less than a year, we have transformed Teutopolis from a severely underserved heartland community into one of the most connected cities in the nation,“ says Nate Thompson and Rod Brumleve, co-owners of American Fiber. “The great news is that we are just getting started, as we architected this network to easily be able to evolve to 10 gig services, and have invested in equipment that is ready for the future. DZS has been a phenomenal technology partner, and the MXK-F219 has given us the pay-as-you-grow flexibility to efficiently and effectively manage our rapid growth.”

To date, American Fiber, DZS, and partner Baltic Networks have collaborated to rapidly enable an infrastructure ready to serve over 1500 people. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has created a more challenging installation environment, American Fiber has still found ways to forge ahead by enabling bandwidth hungry customers to run their own in-home cable and turn-up gigabit services. Next, the company plans to continue to expand its network and services to more homes and businesses in the community, and raise the services bar yet again with the introduction of 10 gig services over their existing equipment and infrastructure soon.

“American Fiber is a great example of how a company with a vision and the right partners can deploy a gigabit infrastructure and literally transform a community in a very short period of time,” explained Mitch Fleming, SVP of Americas Sales and Global Business Development at DZS. “We are proud to be the partner of choice for visionaries like Nate and Rod at American Fiber who are taking matters into their own hands and rapidly closing the digital gap one community at a time and, in so doing, are changing the face and prospects of rural America.”

Source: DZS media announcement