Sorry to be posting so much today. I was sick over the weekend and I want to get caught up – especially with the Minnesota mentions of broadband, including the following company profile from a recent Star Tribune article (Clearfield: Newly wired for profit).

Minnesota-based Clearfield, is a new – well reborn – company that provides copper and fiber-optic equipment to rural phone companies. They used to be called APA and they used to make optical lenses and ultraviolet-light detectors.

Clearfield now serves companies such as Paul Bunyan Telephone Co., 3 Rivers Communication, Heart of Iowa Communications, Pioneer Telephone Cooperative and Rural Telephone.

Apparently the rural FTH market is $3 billion. So it’s good to see a Minnesota company jumping in and it’s good for rural Minnesota to have a local provider.

For any communities of telephone companies that are thinking about fiber Clearfield introduced an easy snap-in wire harnessing cassette technology called Clearview in October, which cut Clearfield’s wire packaging costs by 20 to 25 percent and has been well-received. They just unveiled a new and improved version this month. Here’s a brief blurb from that press release:

“The Clearview Cassette was designed to address the limitations and concerns our customers expressed to us regarding traditional solutions,” said Johnny Hill, vice president of product development and management for APA Cables & Networks. “Our customers asked for a product that would allow them to incrementally grow their networks, in both inside and outside plant environments, while optimizing and protecting signal performance.”