 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Telecommunications, Datacenter, Fiber Optic |
| Founded | 1986 |
| Headquarters | 1800 N Grand River Ave Lansing, MI 48906 |
Key people | Kevin Schoen, Founder & CEO |
Number of employees | 110 |
| Website | www.acd.net |
ACD is a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier and Internet Service Provider, headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. [1] ACD provides Fiber Optic Service, Metro Ethernet, Telephone, Hosted Phone Service, DSL, Datacenter and Web hosting services to all types of customers.
ACD was founded as ACD Computers in 1986 by Kevin Schoen. ACD built and sold their own computer systems through the 1990s. In 1994 ACD became an Internet Service Provider, selling dial-up, hosting and other Internet Services. ACD Telecom, Inc., which is part of ACD obtained CLEC license in early 2000. ACD then deployed equipment into 7 Central Offices in the Lansing and Jackson Michigan markets, and started providing facilities based DSL, T1, Fiber and Phone Services. The company has since expanded to most of Lower Michigan.
ACD owns a Midwest fiber optic and distributed antenna system (DAS). This system serves businesses and residential customers. This network offers gigabit Ethernet service to businesses. Fiber optic service is 50 to 100 times faster than cable modem service and DSL.
The next generation of broadband consists of fiber optic cable deployed to business and residential customers.
ACD was provided with a US$750,000 grant by the Housing and Urban Development under a test project to deploy Wifi Service covering a 8-square-mile (21 km2) area in Springfield, Michigan. As part of the agreement, ACD was required to provide subsidized internet access for a period of 3 years after the deployment, which was completed in spring of 2009.
The company has a 40,000-square-foot (3,700 m2) datacenter in North Lansing that also serves as its headquarters, and was constructed in 2006. [2]
ACD provides security systems to municipalities over its broadband network. [3]
ACD provides services including gigabit Ethernet and SONET services. It has a construction arm that builds fiber networks.
ACD was awarded two rounds of federal funding for construction of fiber networks in more rural counties in Michigan.
This project was created to increase broadband speeds. Local tech firms working with local and state governments can create Midwest Gigabit Cities. Over 1,100 communities applied for the Google Fiber network (creating gigabit cities). It was first turned on in Kansas City in 2012, and expanded to Provo Utah in January 2014. [4]
Digital subscriber line is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), the most commonly installed DSL technology, for Internet access.
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A wireless gateway routes packets from a wireless LAN to another network, wired or wireless WAN. It may be implemented as software or hardware or a combination of both. Wireless gateways combine the functions of a wireless access point, a router, and often provide firewall functions as well. They provide network address translation (NAT) functionality, so multiple users can use the internet with a single public IP. It also acts like a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) to assign IPs automatically to devices connected to the network.
A wireless router or Wi-Fi router is a device that performs the functions of a router and also includes the functions of a wireless access point. It is used to provide access to the Internet or a private computer network. Depending on the manufacturer and model, it can function in a wired local area network, in a wireless-only LAN, or in a mixed wired and wireless network.
A passive optical network (PON) is a fiber-optic telecommunications network that uses only unpowered devices to carry signals, as opposed to electronic equipment. In practice, PONs are typically used for the last mile between Internet service providers (ISP) and their customers. In this use, a PON has a point-to-multipoint topology in which an ISP uses a single device to serve many end-user sites using a system such as 10G-PON or GPON. In this one-to-many topology, a single fiber serving many sites branches into multiple fibers through a passive splitter, and those fibers can each serve multiple sites through further splitters. The light from the ISP is divided through the splitters to reach all the customer sites, and light from the customer sites is combined into the single fiber. Many fiber ISPs prefer this system.
In the field of telecommunications, the concept of triple play service refers to the provision of three essential services — high-speed broadband Internet access, television, and latency-sensitive telephone services — all delivered over a single broadband connection. This approach emphasizes the convergence of multiple services by a single supplier, aiming to enhance user convenience and streamline service delivery.
Fiber to the x or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic cables are able to carry much more data than copper cables, especially over long distances, copper telephone networks built in the 20th century are being replaced by fiber.
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Whidbey Telecom is a private, independent telecommunications company operating on the South End of Whidbey Island in Washington State, the community of Point Roberts, Washington, and its affiliate Hat Island Telephone Company on Hat (Gedney) Island. Whidbey Telecom has been locally owned and operated since it started business in 1908.
The Internet in the United States grew out of the ARPANET, a network sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense during the 1960s. The Internet in the United States of America in turn provided the foundation for the worldwide Internet of today.
In an international context Denmark is viewed as a somewhat peculiar country when it comes to internet access. The former state owned telephone company TDC owns the entire last mile infrastructure in terms of copper telephone lines and the vast majority of the coaxial cable infrastructure as well. Even though the Danish telecommunications infrastructure is very heavily dominated by one company, Danish internet customers still enjoy fair prices and a wide availability of different next generation access internet connections in comparison with most other EU countries. Furthermore, TDCs de facto monopoly on last mile infrastructure has come under attack. In the last decade regional power companies have formed national business alliances aimed at implementing FTTH for private and business end users.
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EPB of Chattanooga, formerly known as the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, is an American electric power distribution and telecommunication company owned by the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. EPB serves nearly 180,000 homes and businesses in a 600-square mile area in the greater Chattanooga area and Hamilton County. In 2010, EPB was the first company in the United States to offer 1 Gbit/s high-speed internet over a fiber optic network, over 200 times faster than the national average. As a result, Chattanooga has been called "Gig City" and held up as a national model for deploying the world's fastest internet and the most advanced Smart Grid electric distribution system in the United States. On October 15, 2015, Chattanooga implemented the world's first community-wide 10-gig Internet service.
10G-PON is a 2010 computer networking standard for data links, capable of delivering shared Internet access rates up to 10 Gbit/s over existing dark fiber. This is the ITU-T's next-generation standard following on from GPON or gigabit-capable PON. Optical fibre is shared by many subscribers in a network known as FTTx in a way that centralises most of the telecommunications equipment, often displacing copper phone lines that connect premises to the phone exchange. Passive optical network (PON) architecture has become a cost-effective way to meet performance demands in access networks, and sometimes also in large optical local networks for fibre-to-the-desk.
NetSmart Limited was a telecommunication service provider based in Tauranga, Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand.
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AT&T Internet is an AT&T brand of broadband internet service. Previously, AT&T Internet was branded as U-verse Internet and bundled with U-verse TV, which was spun off into the newly independent DirecTV in 2021. AT&T Internet plans powered by fiber-optic cable use the AT&T Fiber brand.
