Clearfield and Cruzio Bring "Internet for the Future" to Santa Cruz

Cruzio Internet/Santa Cruz Fiber's mission is to give smaller California communities the same very high-quality “internet for the future” that urban areas expect.

Download

Deployment Overview

When Cruzio took on their first fiber project, the need was to deploy fiber in their downtown Santa Cruz core and nearby mobile home park, to a mix of individual residential and business buildings, plus multi-dwelling units (MDU) and multi-tenant units (MTU).

“There’s a cross-section of pretty much any type of customer in this one build,” says James Hackett, Director of Business Operations & Development, Cruzio Internet/Santa Cruz Fiber. “We chose Clearfield because of the plug-and-play simplicity of their solutions. Our product selections include cabinets, terminals, StrongFiber and microduct. In basically any part of the build that our field technicians would touch, we opted for Clearfield.”

When Cruzio was ready for the install, a Clearfield ^® application engineer provided onsite customer support. “Clearfield’s field support, from first install to helping with ongoing issues, makes such a difference,” says Hackett.

Solution

Cruzio cites two main advantages with Clearfield: cabinet consolidation and speed/ease of deployment, resulting in lower costs. Whereas other vendors require 3-4 cabinets to support the entire build, the modularity and density of the Clearfield FieldSmart ^® Cabinets does the job with only 2. Clearfield’s FieldShield ^® pre-connectorized, pushable drops and StrongFiber Deploy Reels let them eliminate field splicing, significantly reducing overhead of each install.

Fiber now passes about 1,200 buildings in the downtown Santa Cruz area, including public facilities, commercial buildings, MDUs and single-family homes. Facilitated by the city’s dig-once policies, the fiber in the downtown area is completely underground and unobtrusive.

The initial build also included El Rio Mobile Home Park, which is close to the downtown area; neighborhood fiber champions organized to get fiber to the home (FTTH) connections there. “Our mobile home deployment is unique,” says Hackett. “I haven’t heard of anyone overcoming the kinds of issues that we did.”

For El Rio Mobile Home Park, the team first installed an OSP cabinet with Clearview ^® Patch and Splice Cassettes. Splicing inside the cassette reduces the need for splice cases and bigger vaults. From the cabinet, they ran 14/10mm FieldShield Microduct to flower pots for a below grade, non-invasive solution. Once the duct was placed, the team ran a 24-fiber pushable FieldShield MPO Cable from the cabinet to a YOURx ^™ -Terminal in the flower pot.

Next, they installed the YOURx-TAP (test access point) to the side of the trailer. After that was in place, they installed 10/6mm FieldShield Microduct from the YOURx-TAP to the flower pot and then installed the FieldShield StrongFiber Deploy Reel in the YOURx-TAP. They were then able to pull the fiber from the reel and through the duct into the YOURx-Terminal in the flower pot. Once they had the StrongFiber landed in the YOURx-Terminal, they just snapped on the outer housing to complete the SC/APC connector. After cleaning the connector and mating it to the SC/APC output bulkhead, the connectivity from point A to point B was complete.

Results

“We’re delighted to make scorching fast, quality gigabit fiber internet available to more people,” says Hackett. “We believe El Rio is now the best-connected mobile home park in the country.”

“At Cruzio, we place a high value on standardization and modularity,” continues Hackett. “Clearfield products allow us to serve a wide range of possible deployment scenarios without having to maintain an extensive stock of varied equipment and materials. We also love the simplicity of Clearfield solutions. We can train a new apprentice or contractor to use Clearfield solutions quickly because they just make sense.”

FieldSmart Fiber Cross-Connect Cabinet With Door Open

Fiber Distribution Hub: Cross-Connect Cabinet

432 and 864 Ports

Terminal

Greatest design flexibility, cartridge upgrades possible

FieldShield StrongFiber Cable Deploy Reel

StrongFiber Deploy Reel

About Cruzio

Founded in 1989, Cruzio is one of the largest independent internet service providers in California, and recently introduced heretofore unavailable enterprise-level internet services to Santa Cruz County, representing a huge investment in the Santa Cruz community. Cruzio is entrusted with providing internet and technology services for more than 2,000 local businesses. Visit https://cruzio.com/ to learn more.

About Clearfield, Inc.

Clearfield, Inc. (NASDAQ: CLFD) designs, manufactures and distributes fiber optic management, protection and delivery products for communications networks. Our “fiber to anywhere” platform serves the unique requirements of leading incumbent local exchange carriers (traditional carriers), competitive local exchange carriers (alternative carriers), and MSO/cable TV companies, while also catering to the broadband needs of the utility/municipality, enterprise, data center and military markets. Headquartered in Minneapolis, MN, Clearfield deploys more than a million fiber ports each year. For more information, visit https://www.seeclearfield.com or @ClearfieldFiber