The Hinton Telephone Company of Hinton Oklahoma Incorporated

PROJECT PURPOSE

The Hinton Telephone Company of Hinton, Oklahoma, Incorporated (HTC) is making an application for three ARPA project areas that are located in Caddo and Canadian counties in Oklahoma. These project areas contain 110 locations located in the above-mentioned Oklahoma counties. Each project area will be served with gigabit speed and low latency using a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network. The HTC will utilize new, existing, and redundant fiber infrastructure to provide voice, video and internet service to all homes and small businesses within the project area. HTC will build new, buried fiber cable from the proposed PON into the project areas with sufficient fiber count to deliver voice, video and gigabit internet service to all 110 customer locations. Last mile buried fiber facilities will be installed throughout this network to ensure that every customer has an optical terminal available for delivery of service. The HTC will employ an Metaswitch softswitch originating in the main Central Office in Hinton, OK and install optical transport and routing equipment in the closest central office to deliver sufficient bandwidth to the existing access vault, utilizing spare fiber in their existing buried infrastructure.

EVIDENCE

None

POPULATION DESCRIPTION

The ARPA request for HTC is broken down into 3 areas which are all out of city limits and very rural. During the Covid-19 pandemic, school age students were not able to reliably access online school and they were much too far from a city hot-spot or library to be able to access Internet daily for their schoolwork. Those same households do not have the ability to have remote Doctor visits and must be there in person, putting them at a higher risk of infection from other ill or Covid infected patients. The HTC service areas being applied for also uses an aging copper DSL service to the customers. This is proving to be unreliable in the areas that are being applied for to provide reliable Internet service due to being in remote locations with long copper connections. As the need for internet reliability and speeds increase, it has become even more apparent that building a FTTH network is the only long-term solution for our customers.

PERFORMANCE MEASURING

HTC currently has in place all equipment and software needed to meet FCC speed and latency testing requirements. The FCC performance testing framework requires carriers to test speed and latency from the premises of active subscribers to a remote test server located at, or reached by passing through, an FCC-designated Internet exchange point (IXP), which is any building, facility or location housing a public Internet gateway that has an active interface to a qualifying Internet Autonomous System (ASN).

ONGOING INVESTMENT AMOUNT

$

ONGOING INVESTMENT DESCRIPTION

None

ONGOING INVESTMENT REQUIRED

Able to continue operation without additional funding from the State of Oklahoma