On the splitting of places in a tower of function fields meeting the Drinfeld-Vladut bound

A description of how places split in an asymptotically optimal tower of function fields studied by Garcia and Stichtenoth (1995) is provided and an exact count of the number of places of degree one is given. This information is useful in the setting up of generator matrices for algebraic-geometry codes constructed over this function field tower. These long codes have performance that asymptotically improves upon the Gilbert-Varshamov bound.