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NewsGlobe: Currents
Clarksville sees the light
FTTH paves the way for competitive triple play offering in Tennessee
by Jim Barthold
Clarksville, Tenn. labels itself a “broadband community”
thanks to a 630-mile fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network that
the Clarksville Department of Energy (CDE) built to monitor
and control 55,000 residential and commercial electric meters
in the 122,000-person community. That network, which uses
World Wide Packets’ carrier Ethernet technology, is also the
foundation of a triple play offering of IPTV, voice and high-
speed data services the city will offer to every home.
“Most of the justification for their business model was based
off the op ex savings” that the electric utility would gain from
eliminating truck rolls via the fiber monitoring network, said
Marty Hess, director of marketing for World Wide
Packets. “They have the ability to read the meters every 15
minutes for every single meter in the network and can know
ahead of time if there’s a power outage in any location.”
That alone is worth US$30 per truck roll, said Christy Batts,
telecom marketing manager for Clarksville, who said the city
averages about 130,000 of them a year. As long as the
network is there and every home and business is attached to
it, it made sense to offer a triple play on top, she said. The
city will roll out that service, including 10 Mbps of data
services scalable up to a gigabit, on an area by area basis
over the next year.
“If we have an area completely build with the new digital
meter on the home … we will open it up for other options if
they so choose,” said Batts.
Also opening up is the possibility that the city could do more
business with the local college, Austin Peay University, and its
9,000 students.
“We’re already in early talks with those folks about the
options we can bring to the table for them, everything from
being able to provide possible services or even if we’re not
chosen to provide those services and they stay with the
incumbent (AT&T or Charter Cable), I’m talking about some
co-op job opportunities for the IT students there for network
monitoring and the like,” she said.
Batts made it clear that the city’s first intention was not to
compete with the incumbents; it was to save money for the
electric utility. In fact, she said, the network probably never
would have been built if the cost of fiber hadn’t dropped the
way it has. Because glass costs less “the fiber-to-the-home
process was much more conducive than anything else we have
seen,” she said.
It also helps that the FTTH will be viable for quite some time
into the future because Clarksville is a city with the future in
its sights, she said, with a meter base that “has grown on
average of six percent every year within the last 30 years.”
Of course, the incumbents were not overly excited that the
city was getting into their business, Batts admitted.
“There was a little bit of grief and frustration on their part
(but) in the long run the best thing out of this is going to be
for the consumers. It’s going to make both of us work very
hard to maintain our customer base with good customer
service and good product.”
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