Home | Sign up for newsletters!

About

Advanced Search

NewsGlobe: Currents

Clarksville sees the light

FTTH paves the way for competitive triple play offering in Tennessee

      

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.”

The M2M Switch - turning the wireless business model upside down -- September 1, 2010

Vivendi raises 2010 goals after strong first-half results -- September 1, 2010

FCC cuts off free nationwide broadband potential indefinitely -- September 1, 2010

Shipments of Bluetooth, NFC, UWB, 802.15.4 and Wi-Fi ICs will increase 20% in 2010 -- September 1, 2010

3PAR claims widespread uptake for VMware 'vSphere' service -- August 31, 2010

Related articles:

Beth Nicholson joins Telecommunications Media Group -- September 1, 2009
New editor will help steer the company’s event platforms

Qwest Taps IBM for IP network and VoIP management -- June 22, 2009
Extends suite of managed products to mid-sized business market

AT&T bumps U.S. MPLS backbone speed up to 40 Gbps -- November 25, 2008
Initial capacity jump presages future move to 100 Gbps

Clearwire, with Sprint XOHM onboard, is a go -- November 21, 2008
Shareholders approve merger and announce plans for a gradual national deployment

M2M Zone Keep up with the latest in Machine-to-Machine Communications:

Read M2M Newsdesk
News, research, show coverage and more, covering the M2M industry.

Visit the M2M Zone
M2M Zone Seminars offer the latest information, directly from industry leaders and experts. The M2M Zone is a fixture at top-shelf trade shows including CeBIT and CTIA Wireless. Learn more about what the M2M Zone offers.


Horizon House Network
Microwave Journal
Wireless & RF News


BVD Electronic Publishing
Hosting & Development

Advertisement

©2010 Telecommunications Online & Horizon House Publications®.

 
Home | NewsGlobe | Events | Contact Us | Register | About Us | Advertise

All rights reserved. Privacy Policy.

Advertisement




Let the news come to you
Sign up for newsletters!