Thew City of Northampton elected to invest under $600K in this new network that will facilitiate high speed data, VoIP, and emergency services applications today with the expectation next generation applications in wireless, security, and video will be added to the network in 2013. The network is projected to provide a high return on investment for the city as the network replaces older more traditional telecommunications services which are costly to maintain on a monthly basis. The Comm-Tract provided fiber optic MAN (Municipal Area Network) is expected to be in service for over 30 years.

The fiber and wireless network provides all the high speed voice, data, and security communications infrastructure for the Town of Plymouth. The first phase of the deployment completed in early 2007 provided fiber optic and wireless services to 18 town buildings, and the second phase of the network rolled out additional fiber to all of the school buildings. Today the full fiber and wireless MAN encompasses over 1800 Verizon and National Grid joint owned poles, is predominately aerial with just over 2 miles of underground conduits provided by Comm-Tract, has over 180,000 feet, or just over 35 miles of laser optimized Single Mode 24 to 192 strand fiber cable, and also has 5 sites served and interconnected to the Fiber MAN with 54mbps backbone wireless devices. The MAN terminates in over 28 buildings throughout the Town of Plymouth. The deployment of the 10/100gbps switching layer of the network was also completed. The entire Fiber/Wireless MAN is architected as a multi-ring carrier class topology with full redundancy to all sites on the network. Comm-Tract also deployed the structured high performance interior cabling infrastructure in the Town Hall and Central Data Center which serves all town and school buildings on the network. Joe Young, the Director of Information Technology for the Town of Plymouth said; “The team from Comm-Tract took care of everything for us from the design and deployment of the fiber and wireless MAN, to acting as our trusted consultant on anything regarding network communications for our community. We have never met a team of people from one company with the experience and expertise of the Comm-Tract organization.”

The network has been built in stages, the first phase was completed in June 2006 and encompassed over 1200 Verizon pole locations, and had over 100,000 feet of single mode 24 to 144 strand figure 8 self support Corning fiber cable installed along with the switching layer of the network. In subsequent phases, the City network is now complete.

The Fiber Optic MAN is primarily aerial cable, with the remainder in Comm-Tract provided trenching/underground facilities that provide crossings under various highways. The gigabit switches provide the access layer, and this in turn ties into the respective LAN environments in the buildings. Comm-Tract also provided and installed the City of Gloucester’s interior structured cabling systems for all LAN environments and workstation locations, the Communications Rooms, and the Data Center in the High School. The City of Gloucester is ahead of the times and was one of the first Cities in the Commonwealth to deploy such a network. Grant Harris, the Manager of Information Systems for the City of Gloucester, rated Comm-Tract a perfect 10 in every aspect of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts ITC 45 blanket contract customer survey after the project was completed.