Cablefax The Magazine August 2022 - 10

INDEPENDENT OPERATOR OF THE YEAR
Family Matters
at Armstrong
By Sara Winegardner
Jeff Ross engages with some of the twenty qualifying technicians at the annual Fiber Splicing Competition in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Armstrong Utilities has come a long way
since its humble beginnings as an upstart
telephone plant construction company.
It
was founded in 1946 by family members and
close friends who began stringing telephone
lines to bring communications technologies
to the area around Kittanning, Pennsylvania.
Today, it is a third-generation owned company
that has successfully brought the technologies
touted by the largest cable operators
in the world to the rural and suburban
communities it has served for decades while
keeping employees top of mind.
Armstrong has been on the rise for quite
a while, but really began making a splash
over the last few years with its Network of
the Future initiative. The FTTH upgrade program
began in 2019 and will eventually bring
upgraded bandwidth capacity and speeds to
more than 50% of its customers. Armstrong
is leading the industry with deployment of 10
Gigabit PON (XGS PON), opening the door for
customers to eventually receive 10G symmetrical
speeds.
Fiber is nothing new to the company as it
has operated HFC networks since the early
1990s and began implementing fiber-to-thehome
in new builds approximately a decade
later. Now, Armstrong is making a $300 million
bet that fiber will provide the speed and
reliability that its customers will rely on for
years to come.
" There were advances occurring within
DOCSIS that we saw would get us to the next
step with cable modems, but it seemed like
it was going to provide short-term relief and
not be the long-term decision, and we always
try to make the right long-term decision, "
President Jeff Ross says. " Early on, we had
some hard discussions [such as] 'wow, that's
a lot of money-should we take this interim
step and see what happens?' "
Ultimately, the leadership team decided
to make what it calls a " generational investment "
to ensure it is ready to serve customers
far into the future. When that decision
was made back in 2018, the team had no
idea just how huge and essential the broadband
industry would become over the next
few years. Now, Armstrong's senior execs are
sure they made the right choice.
" There's no physicist out there that would
say glass is going to run out of capacity in
50 years. There's no talk of that because the
electronics that you put on both ends, they
just keep advancing under Moore's law, "
says Armstrong CTO Mike Giobbi. " We're
talking about 10 gig now, but there's work
being done on 25, 50 gig... There will be a
day when we can make it financially make
sense to run 100 gig to the home. "
The COVID-19 pandemic did cause some
disruption to the project as technicians had
10
August 2022
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Cablefax The Magazine August 2022

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