Vyve Broadband Customers Receive Major Boost with Completion of 400-mile Fiber-Optic Ring in Oklahoma
Ring Improves Speed, Service Immediately and has Room to Grow with Demand
Vyve Broadband has completed its buildout of a 400- mile fiber ring around central and eastern Oklahoma. The ring, which spans 40 communities from Shawnee to Tulsa to Ft. Gibson to McAlester and back to Shawnee, allows Vyve to provide a fully redundant, world-class network for residential and business customers. Vyve has built 48 fibers into its ring, which will provide significant capacity for growth even as demand for bandwidth continues to increase. The ring buildout is the culmination of a $200 million investment to bring world-class Internet service to all of Vyve’s rural communities.
“The completion of our fiber-optic ring in Oklahoma is a true game-changer for our customers in rural communities everywhere we do business,” Vyve Broadband CEO Jeffrey S. DeMond said. “This has been a goal of ours since day one — to provide our customers with not just the fastest speeds but also the stability, reliability and flexibility that having our own fiber-optic ring affords.”
The ring is redundant, meaning that if it is ever cut in a single location, there is no interruption of service. This represents a huge advantage for Vyve customers who previously relied on shared networks while the ring was being constructed. Today, only four of the 48 fibers are in use, delivering data and video content up to 80 gigabits per second (Gbps). The system has the ability to expand to several hundred Gbps on the same four fibers, and the ring as a whole has immense capacity to meet the needs of the market down the road as consumption continues to grow year after year.
“This puts us in a fantastic position to handle the expected explosion of broadband demand in the coming years,” DeMond said. “As our customers — both residential and commercial — require faster speeds and more data, we will be able to accommodate that through this newly completed ring. We’ve already begun successful testing of speeds up to 1 gigabit per second in some markets, which is well beyond the needs of most customers yet perfectly in line with where the industry is headed. Just as needs grow, so will our capability to meet them.”
Vyve’s Oklahoma ring spans roughly 400 miles and is made up of 48 separate fibers. It feeds seven main hubs, which then provide direct service to 34 other cities and towns and over 40 municipalities across the state. The Vyve ring is connected to a larger network that includes Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas and Atlanta. These feeds are also redundant “rings within a ring.“ The Oklahoma ring also feeds signal to Vyve customers in Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Kansas, Tennessee, Wyoming and Georgia.