CLEC Montana Opticom Launches Gigabit Service

Broadband provider Montana Opticom now offers gigabit service to both residential and business customers in Belgrade (MT). The company has offered gigabit service in the business market for about two years, but “it wasn’t a residential price point,” said Montana Opticom President Jim Dolan. The deployment is interesting not only because it is in a smaller market but also because the company is not the incumbent service provider there. Montana Opticom began offering service in parts of Montana using fiber-to-the-home infrastructure in 2005, later buying some copper-based networks and converting those networks to fiber. The company also won a broadband stimulus award that helped cover the cost of some of its FTTH deployments.