Ellicott City isn’t your typical small town. Part of Howard County Maryland and ranked as the 7th best county in the United States, Ellicott City has ventured into high-tech territory. With two new communities, Taylor Village and Waverly Woods seem to be the quintessential storybook neighborhood with beautiful homes, spacious parks, shopping, arts and social activities – all within close proximity. What makes these neighborhoods even more unique is that they are electronically savvy, and future-proofed.  

With new beginnings come new experiences, and a new experience was the goal for the Taylor Service Company, community developer, and Sky Cable, the consultant. The Taylor Service Company created the Ellicott City Cable Company (ECC) as the service provider within the communities, bringing an unparalleled user experience, both in channel lineup and optional pay-per-view programming lineups. Customers can choose from a variety of packages, including an “analog” service package with over 100 channels, and/or many digital packages. Internet packages start at 3 Mb/sec and go up to 100 Mb/sec.

AFL’s Solution
ECC evaluated a variety of different technologies to provide service, including B-PON, E-PON, and Ethernet Point-to-Point (PTP) architectures. Ultimately, ECC chose an AFL Telecommunications’ Ethernet PTP architecture, using two fibers to each home. One of the fibers is used for voice and data services, with coarse WDM used to provide downstream connectivity at 1550 nm and upstream connectivity at 1310 nm. The second fiber is used for video services at 1550 nm. 

Ethernet PTP is an excellent choice, as the two fibers ensure that the system will be future-proof and provide up to 100 MB/second symmetric bandwidth to each subscriber. This was an attractive feature relative to PON technologies, as PTP architectures do not share bandwidth the way that PON systems do. Use of the PTP platform ensures that an electronics upgrade won’t be needed until bandwidth requirements to each user are greater than 100 MB/second.

A second attractive feature of PTP architectures is that they are significantly less expensive to deploy than PON architectures, since the end electronics are usually less expensive than PON electronics. The added cost of the second fiber per home typically is not large enough to offset the significant savings generated by the electronics. 

Customer Feedback
Taylor Village boasts 750 single family dwelling units and condominiums and Waverly Woods an additional 750 homes. Drops are spliced in the pedestals and one pedestal is shared by approximately six homes. The result is a high performance, high reliability network.

The Taylor Service Company plans expansion in the future. As the community grows and requirements for faster and better technology come into play, the Taylor Service Company already has the capabilities to grow with them.

Links
Ellicott City Cable Company www.eccable.com
Sky Cable www.skycableusa.com
Taylor Service Company www.taylorservice.com
Taylor Village www.taylorvillage.com
Waverly Woods www.waverlywoodsnews.com

Community Overview