Press Releases

DZS Velocity to provide FTTx network, services on St. Kitts-Nevis island

April 24, 2023

Posted by: Shriya Raban

Dallas, United States. 18 April 2023 – DZS has announced that St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd., a local provider of internet and television services, is leveraging DZS Velocity Optical Line Terminals (OLTs) and DZS Helix Optical Networking Terminals (ONTs) to replace its existing legacy Hybrid Fibre-Coaxial (HFC) cable network with all-fibre Gigabit Passive Optical network (GPON) capable of delivering gigabit broadband speeds. This network and services transformation is being enabled by longtime DZS partner Lucas Telecom, and will result in significantly increased broadband speeds, service turn-up agility and improved reliability for The Cable’s residential and business customers which include financial services, hospitality, small-to-medium sized enterprise, and educational and governmental institutions.

The new in-ground fibre infrastructure, which is currently being deployed across the island, included an initial deployment that was completed within six weeks. St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. has worked closely with the local government and other key stakeholders to ensure that its new fibre-to-the-x (fibre-to-the-home for residential customers and fibre-to-the-premises for business customers) broadband network will meet the needs of the island’s residential and business subscribers, including the essential local hospitality industry.

“St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. is to be working with DZS and Lucas Telecom to bring high-bandwidth broadband internet and video services to our residential and business customers” says Patricia Walters, CEO, St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. “The high performance and robust in-ground GPON network that we are building will offer not only a better customer experience but also much lower maintenance, reduced downtime from power cuts and higher reliability, especially during power outages due to storms and hurricanes. To stay on the services we are rolling out this new network very rapidly throughout the entire island of St. Kitts, and DZS and Lucas Telecom are stepping-up to meet our accelerated timeframe.”

“Internet access has become an essential service in homes and businesses around the world, and traditional cable operators are increasingly turning to FTTx to provide a more efficient and higher performance network infrastructure than HFC,” says Tom Carter, chief customer officer for Americas and EMEA at DZS. “This transformation is even more critical in the Caribbean, where hurricanes can knock out communications networks for weeks, potentially leaving subscribers without cable or internet. DZS and Lucas Telecom are helping St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. address this challenge head-on, with a rapid shift to not only a much more robust and reliable fiber network infrastructure, but one that can be easily upgraded to 10 gig XGS-PON technology in the future and beyond. We are proud to be working with both The Cable and Lucas Telecom to bring this powerful network to St. Kitts.”

“Our tagline at Lucas Telecom is ‘We make it work,’ and that’s exactly what we are doing for St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd.,” says Chris Lucas, CEO, Lucas Telecom. “There are many challenges to bringing high-performance GPON broadband services to Caribbean markets, and the flexibility and reliability of DZS solutions plus its strong engineering team are ideal to meet what can be very difficult island deployment demands.”

DZS solutions that St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. is deploying include latest generation DZS Velocity fibre access core network and DZS Helix customer premises solutions, allowing residential triple-play and high-bandwidth business services.

As more cable and internet subscribers around the Caribbean and around the world demand symmetrical gigabit and multi-gigabit service levels so they can work from home, enjoy gaming and participate in videoconferencing and metaverse-type applications, forward-looking service providers like St. Kitts-Nevis Cable Communications Ltd. are evolving to high-performance network infrastructures that are standards-based and cost-effective to upgrade and manage to support new, bandwidth-intensive and low-latency services.

DZS offers a portfolio of Access EDGESubscriber EDGEOptical EDGE and cloud-based solutions that are designed to create the ultimate subscriber experience. DZS technologies enable service providers to rapidly and cost-effectively transform their networks to become multi-gigabit “experience providers” today while laying a future-ready foundation for in-place upgrades to 50/100-gig performance tomorrow. DZS platforms and software are standards-based, interoperable with many other vendors’ equipment, and specifically designed to be managed in multi-vendor environments.

To learn more about DZS, visit here.

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