Introduction
Building a fiber-to-the-home network is the hard part. Running it well, year after year, is what separates a community broadband project that survives from one that thrives. The City of Wilson, North Carolina has done both. Its Greenlight Community Broadband fiber network has delivered high-speed internet to residents and businesses since 2008, and it has held a churn rate consistently under 2 percent. Behind that result is a long partnership with ETI Software, whose platform gave Greenlight the operational visibility to plan FTTH expansion, manage its fiber network, and hold down cost as it grew.
Background
Greenlight Community Broadband is a fiber-to-the-home network owned and operated by the City of Wilson. “Greenlight is our community’s fiber-to-the-home network that is owned and operated by the city of Wilson. We’ve been in operation since 2008,” said Will Aycock, Enterprise Service Director, City of Wilson, and former General Manager at Greenlight. The motive was never only connectivity. “Our purpose is to support the economic health of Wilson to help improve the quality of life of our citizens,” Aycock added.
From the start, Greenlight ran on a clear operating principle. “Proactive service is the key to keeping customers happy and to running a network efficiently and profitably,” said Aycock. That belief, that you get ahead of problems rather than react to them, shaped how the network was built, staffed, and managed.
Wilson sits in eastern North Carolina, and its leaders treated that position as an opportunity rather than a limit. When the city looked ahead in the 2000s, its mayor, council, and management decided broadband was the next piece of community infrastructure worth owning, and that the build should be as futureproof as the technology allowed. For a network meant to serve the community for decades, that meant fiber, and an FTTH architecture of optical line terminals in the central office feeding optical network terminals in the home across a passive optical network.
The city framed Greenlight’s mandate plainly: plan, operate, and grow the network and its revenue stream as efficiently as possible. Meeting that mandate is where ETI came in.
Challenge
An FTTH network is only as good as the data an operator keeps on it. As Greenlight built out and turned up subscribers, accurate record-keeping became the first priority. The network carried thousands of fiber strand records, field equipment spread across the footprint, and a growing subscriber base, all of which had to be tracked precisely, or the cost of running the network would climb.
Several problems came with scale:
- Field service was hard to coordinate. Greenlight needed a way to see daily work orders and dispatch technicians by region instead of sending trucks back and forth across the footprint.
- Field equipment was costly and easy to lose track of. Splitters, ONTs, set-top boxes, and LT cards represented real money sitting in cabinets and homes, with no simple way to know what could be reclaimed and reused.
- Sales and network health lived in separate systems. Greenlight had no single geographic view of where subscribers were, how campaigns were performing, or where the fiber network was degrading.
- Storms happen. Eastern North Carolina weather meant outages, and Greenlight needed a response process that found the worst-hit areas fast.
Manual processes and disconnected systems invite human error, and at FTTH scale that error shows up as wasted truck rolls, repurchased equipment, and slower restoration.
Solutions
Greenlight deployed ETI’s broadband and service management platform and tied the operation to a single map-based view of the network. Four workflows show how that changed the day-to-day.
Field service on a map
ETI integrated every work order type and service-vehicle location into a web-enabled map of Greenlight’s footprint, showing the real-time status of every service call. Dispatchers could group open calls by region, send the nearest crew, and flag past-due or repeat calls before they turned into complaints. The geographic view cut travel time and fuel and tightened response windows.
Inventory and device reclamation
ETI monitored field equipment capacity and used weekly and monthly reports to surface gear that could be pulled back from the field and reused. Greenlight deploys more than 2,400 ONTs a year, each requiring LT cards and splitter cords, so an aggressive reclamation policy meant buying far less new equipment and lowering maintenance costs across the network.
Sales and ARPU by geography. ETI displayed every subscriber and the services on their account in a single map, letting Greenlight run spatial analysis on sales trends by neighborhood, city, and region. The same view tracked campaign results and average revenue per user, showing where penetration lagged, so marketing and resource allocation could follow the data.
Network monitoring and storm response. Greenlight ran its fiber network through one map interface in the NOC, watching network alarms, signal degradations, fiber cuts, and ONT status in real time. On many occasions, staff cleared issues before any customer noticed. After storms, the same view lets crews focus on the most affected areas first.
That fiber network management discipline, keeping accurate fiber routes and strand records in a GIS, is what Greenlight’s outside-plant and design team relies on every day, and it is the same fiber monitoring and management capability ETI now delivers through its Intelegrate suite.
Results
“ETI has guided our FTTH network expansion, increased efficiency across all business units, and improved customer service satisfaction, helping us consistently maintain a churn rate of less than 2 percent,” said Aycock. “It’s been a game-changer for us.”
The operational gains showed up in the numbers:
- A churn rate held consistently under 2 percent across the life of the network.
- A 20 percent reduction in unnecessary truck rolls from mapped field-service dispatch, plus a further 10 percent annual reduction tied to proactive network monitoring.
- Hundreds of thousands of dollars in avoided equipment costs over a two-year period through field reclamation.
- Network issues were identified and resolved before customers were aware of them, and a faster, better-organized dispatch after storm outages.
For a city-owned FTTH provider, those results are what make community broadband sustainable. Greenlight planned, operated, and grew its network on its own terms, and the partnership with ETI is part of why Wilson can keep investing in the infrastructure its future expansion depends on.
See how ETI helps telcos, broadband providers, municipalities, utility co-ops, open access providers, and WISPs run and grow their FTTH networks at etisoftware.com.
