The Challenge
Premium Choice Broadband runs fiber services from its headquarters in Brewer, Maine, and its mission is to bridge the digital divide in the state's rural counties. Founded in 2007 and part of the Varney family of companies, the operator has grown from five broadcast locations around Bangor to more than 67 sites covering roughly 7,000 square miles between Rockwood and Surry. Fiber-to-the-home, DSL, cable, and wireless services reach over 5,000 Maine families and businesses across Hancock, Penobscot, and Piscataquis counties.
That footprint outgrew the core. An aging Cisco core router had to go, and a follow-on project had to replace a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Infinity supporting a statewide fiber ring. Budget pressure and the cost of traditional rip-and-replace upgrades made the existing vendor path unattractive.
The Solution
Premium Choice picked OcNOS SP, running on UfiSpace white box hardware, for both projects:
- Initial deployment: OcNOS-SP-IPBASE-2400 on the UfiSpace S9600-72XC aggregation router, an open networking platform built for 5G and broadband applications with up to 2.4 Tbps of switching capacity.
- Second phase: OcNOS-SP-IPBASE-800 on UfiSpace S9510-28DC hardware to connect a fiber ring around the state of Maine, providing an easy path to 400G ports.
- Optics: Premium Choice sourced interconnect optics from E.C.I. Networks to link the OcNOS routers.
성과
The first cutover succeeded on its own terms, which is why Premium Choice committed to the second phase around the statewide ring. The core no longer sets the limit: the S9510-28DC opens an easy path to 400G ports, so the ring buildout can continue without another core replacement. Running the routing stack as software on open hardware also steps the operator off the vendor-dictated refresh cycle that made the last upgrade expensive.
- An outdated Cisco core router is out of service, replaced by an OcNOS SP and UfiSpace stack.
- Capacity and feature changes become a maintenance task rather than a capital project.
- Separating software from hardware leaves the upgrade schedule with Premium Choice, not its supplier.
Why OcNOS
"The immediate availability of upgrade equipment, the robustness of the software, and, of course, the paradigm-changing price, made our upgrade choice relatively obvious," said Andy Breda, Network Manager of Premium Choice Broadband. "Network disaggregation and smart software not only make today's performance sufficient for any modern application, but upgrades in the future will consist of low-impact software updates versus the rip-and-replace strategy other vendors require."