US telco Halstad Telephone has selected Calix to provide solutions from its Unified Access portfolio in order to enable the telco to deliver 100 Mbps services to thousands of homes and businesses in communities it serves across Minnesota and North Dakota.

The telco reportedly plans to leverage an aggregate of US$ 11.7mn in broadband stimulus funds in order to implement and deploy its network, and then deliver advanced IPTV services (using Cisco middleware), residential and business data services, fibre-fed mobile backhaul services, and Voice over IP services.  

Halstad Telephone has won three sets of funding in round one of the Broadband Initiatives Program of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, with the three awarded proposals together covering seven communities and surrounding rural areas in the Red River Valley, lying between Minnesota and North Dakota. 

Each community will be served via a combination of fibre access technologies (Active Ethernet or GPON), while VDSL2 will be used as a deep-fibre technology in the town of Hillsboro (North Dakota).