Midco is two years into a $500 million upgrade project called Fiber Forward, which aims to deliver multi-gigabit service to 300,000 homes and businesses over a six to eight year time span. Despite the name, COO Ben Dold told Fierce the initiative isn’t just about running fiber to new homes and businesses, but also about beefing up the fiber backbone that supports its cable customers as well.
The ultimate goal is to deliver 10-gig services to all Midco customers across Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, whether they’re connected with a fiber or coax drop. Right now, it offers symmetrical speeds of up to 5 Gbps to fiber customers and 1 G Gbps/200 Mbps to coax customers using DOCSIS 3.1 technology.
“We’ll get to 10G in multiple ways,” Dold said. “We’re doing a lot of fiber. All of our new expansion, whether that be greenfield or network extensions, is all fiber-to-the-prem. And we’re doing a healthy mix of fiber-to-the-prem and DOCSIS upgrades in our existing footprint. We’re really following the industry in terms of the path towards D[OCSIS] 3.1 mid-split, D3.1 high-split and then evaluating the path to D4.0.”
Dold said Midco is roughly a quarter of the way through the Fiber Forward project. Work thus far has focused on upgrades to its core fiber network. That includes tasks like adding redundant fiber rings, putting “a lot” of new fiber hubs in the communities it serves and beefing up the fiber counts on its trunk routes. It has also been focused on getting the right field teams and permitting in place.
With that foundational work now behind it, Dold said he expects the pace of upgrades and new construction will quicken. A Midco representative told Fierce it’s aiming to add about 25,000 passings annually, which equates to roughly 2-3% annual growth in its passings.
On the cable side, Dold said it’s been actively doing node splits for the past couple of years, aiming to reduce the number of customers served by a single node. It has also been upgrading its coax system with mid-splits on 1.2 GHz Remote-PHY infrastructure. It is currently trialing high-splits. Dold added Midco deployed an IPTV solution a few years ago. As more customers transition away from legacy video to that service, it will free up additional spectrum that will allow Midco to push the speed envelope on its cable plant.
On the fiber side, Dold said it’s still using EPON but is trialing XGS-PON in the lab. It hopes to begin field trials later this year.
Workforce
Of course, all the aforementioned work requires people – lots of them. Dold said Midco has had to both upskill its existing workforce and hire new technicians to get the job done.
“We’re doing a lot of expansion while also really building upgrades into our existing network, so that’s required additional staff to support that work,” he said. “We really had to look at both our field ops, which is our technicians, both our in-the-home technicians as well as our maintenance team, and then really growing our internal construction team…to be able to take on the body of work.”
Dold said Midco is very interested in participating in the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program. But he added its decisions about where to expand – both with BEAD and without – will be made based on how well it thinks it can balance internal resources.
“The labor market all over the place, but especially in our part of the world, is challenging to hire people. So, we want to make sure we do it in a way that’s comfortable for us and we have a good balance across all of our different initiatives,” he concluded.