Solana Beach, CA

Solana Beach is an upscale coastal city of about 6,000 home and business sites. It is a mix of suburban lot single family homes, condo complexes, and commercial. While it had various Internet options from AT&T, Spectrum and Cox, none of it was fiber to the home.

Netly approached Solana Beach in early 2018 to build out a complete fiber to the home/business network. Netly's network would operate as an open access network, leasing fiber to any Internet Service Provider and also to others that require fiber such as wireless carriers, the local utilities for monitoring and control, and the city government itself for traffic control, cameras and security.

From the city's perspective, their residents would gain gigabit high speed access, and the network would be a de-facto "dig once" plan for fiber since no other fiber would need to be trenched. Netly's design would ensure there would be enough fiber for any company for any purpose well into the future.

Netly signed an agreement with the city of Solana Beach in mid-2019 (incumbant telcos opposing) and started construction January 2020. All funding/financing is being borne by Netly. This is costing the city $0. Netly's first signed "tenant" for their network was Ting Internet who will provide symmetric gigabit Internet to residents for $89/month and also offer TV service. Service is expected to be available for the first set of customers by mid 2020.

Netly has built an "Edge Fiber Center" in Solana Beach where all fiber will be centrally run. Netly will fully build out a conduit network and then pull fiber to customers on an as requested basis. They use above ground field cabinets as distribution points for residential and business end points. Large fiber count cables are pulled to the distribution cabinets and then patched to small count cables that are blown in micro ducts to end points. Netly's tenants, the ISPs, utilities, etc. will house their network equipment in the Edge Fiber Center in temperature controlled and power backed up cabinets.

Since this is an urban build, Netly can use microtrenching techniques against roadway concrete gutters. Many small microducts can be inserted into one microtrench. Microtrenching, conduit insertion and patching can all be done in one day, leaving neighborhood roads looking the same as they were before.

This architecture allows each fiber user to have a dedicated fiber strand from the end point to the central aggregation point. And it scales no matter how many fibers are required by the various current and potential customers. This is the best of all worlds for a community. The fiber network is run by a competent for profit company that has experience in maintaining it and using it to its full advantage. Residents get inexpensive gigabit Internet from multiple providers. Wireless carriers are now able to expand their 5G footprint without having to build their own fiber network. And it allows other companies access to ubiquitous fiber optic cabling.