Scatter Creek, XKL join forces to boost rural connectivity with advanced broadband services

XKL, a solutions-based optical networking provider, announced the successful deployment of a high-capacity DWDM solution benefiting rural communities by Washington-based ISP Scatter Creek Infonet.

Leveraging XKL’s right-sized strategy, advanced optical networking solutions and high-touch customer service, Scatter Creek’s newly enhanced network delivers operational simplicity and cost efficiencies while supporting end users and subscribers with reliable, rich connectivity.

Scatter Creek, after experiencing a significant increase in demand and exceeding the bandwidth of its existing equipment, needed an advanced, cost-efficient solution to expand capabilities while eliminating outage and downtime issues. Seeking a local team of accessible experts, Scatter Creek found XKL, who crafted a tailor-made proposal for a FOADM (Fixed Optical Add Drop Multiplexer) solution that offered previously untapped opportunities. Scatter Creek simplified network management while significantly reducing expenses through their greenfield DWDM network investment.

Benefits of XKL’s DWDM Solutions
Scatter Creek now leverages a DWDM network solution complete with 100G/400G transport capabilities. XKL’s advanced network solutions technologically pave the way for reliable connectivity across surrounding rural communities, delivering flexibility for capacity expansion while offering optimized performance and reliability.

Particularly for providers of this size, balancing cost-efficiency and technical excellence is a priority, making tailored network solutions highly advantageous. This is why XKL prioritizes hands-on support to explain, build and deploy network solutions that offer exactly what a customer requires — no more, no less. By eliminating unnecessary or extraneous network capabilities, XKL ensures customers get the best DWDM results on time and on budget with no licensing fees ever. In this case, provisioning a streamlined, user-friendly network allowed Scatter Creek to manage its own backhaul, creating further financial and operational efficiencies.

Brian Van Mondfrans, IT Manager at Scatter Creek
As a smaller, rural ISP, we found that many commonly offered network solutions just didn’t suit our architecture. XKL really took the time to listen to our goals and draw on their expertise to show us a different way of proceeding. The end result of our collaboration with XKL is that we don’t need to pay for additional software or GUIs with unneeded features and associated subscription fees, and we weren’t pushed to add more ports or interface cards than we needed. This DWDM solution is ideally sized for our use case, has a simple management interface that supports SNMP, was delivered with a seamless plug-and-play approach and offers superior technical results. We couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

Rick Vitzthum, CFO of Scatter Creek
This all comes down to delivering digital opportunities to our rural customers, and with XKL’s network expertise, we were able to cut our operational costs by 40%. By reducing operational complexity and averting huge network expenses, we’re more agile and flexible for our customers’ futures and have the capacity to support other regional ISPs and partners as we build this connectivity fabric. With other network providers, we struggled to find the size of solution we needed, and some would have made us pay tens of thousands annually for just a graphic user interface. XKL’s creative networking and customer-first approach has worked wonders for both us and our subscribers. The Fast Mode