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JIM BARTHOLD
When the communications-starved folks of Grant County, Wash., demanded a new gig, their utility provider brought them a gigabit of full duplex Ethernet over fiber-to-the-home networks.
The utility needed to connect its electric accounts to a two-way network to monitor electric and gas functions. Throwing fiber into them made sense, and, when World Wide Packets offered a way to deliver a gig of Ethernet over that fiber, it was a natural.
"We live in a very rural spot," says Jonathan Moore, senior telecommunications engineer of the Grant County Public Utility District. "The public is very much asking the local utility to assist and bring in some competition, bring in some choice."
The county has gone from Gunsmoke to Star Wars.
"We're in the middle of a 100-home pilot project with a full county-wide deployment scheduled to begin in March 2001," says Moore.
For $40 a month, consumers get a gig of Ethernet and can cut deals with voice, video and data service providers.
"All the consumer has to do is arrange and pay for this service and, over time, actually pay off his own infrastructure," says Moore. "We offer unbundled plant, and the consumer makes arrangements for service providers"
World Wide Packets' technology consists of a residential gateway, called a subscriber distribution unit (SDU) and a community distribution unit (CDU).
The SDU "takes a pair of fibers and a gig of Ethernet and has all the features to make integrated voice, video and data work correctly and delivers that to the subscriber as 10/100 (BaseT) Ethernet," says World Wide's president/CEO Bernard Daines.
The CDU is a "200-port aggregator box that connects up to 200 of these subscriber units into an ISP or a data center on the backbone or whatever you might want to a router," Daines adds. "A neighborhood, community, apartment building, strip mall or whatever will be wired with some number of the SDUs and some smaller number of the CDUs to provide all the aggregate bandwidth."
Together, the pieces connect a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network Grant County Utility just happened to have.
"Power companies have the rights-of-ways, the trucks, the experience," Daines says, explaining why the company is first targeting its products to utilities. "We think the telcos and the cable companies will come along afterwards."
In Grant County, they'll probably ride along the utility's glass.
"Our first video provider has started provisioning streaming video," says Moore. "We'll actually see how this system behaves and start loading it up with 90 channels of multicast and 200 VOD (video-on-demand) channels."
The network's possibilities, he says, are drawing outside interest.
"It's caught on with a number of people," he says. "I've talked to a Hollywood producer, talked to a movie firm and yet another gentleman, so there are four different companies that want to provision entertainment to our consumers because they see this as a truly low-cost way to gain market share."
The incumbents, too, have their ears to the wires.
"We've been receiving tremendous response," he continues. "Some of these folks go off and pay $5,000 a subscriber for a cable system. In our area they don't have to pay that; they pay $40 a month, and they can be a service provider."
Not everyone is on board. The local cable companies, Northland Cable and USA Media "would really prefer to use the various rights-of-way that they have to continue to put out coaxial services," Moore says.
Qwest (formerly U S West) is the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC), with company from GTE, Sprint United, PTI and CenturyTel, Moore says.
Then there are the outsiders.
"There's a company called IP worldcom out of Canada and a company called Northwest Telephone in Wenatchee (Wash.) that are interested in providing CLEC services," he says.
As for the incumbents, he says, "Once they see some of their business starting to erode, they will start taking a lot more interest. A lot of them are probably just sitting back, looking to see if people really accept this."
Early indications are that people not only accept it, they demand it.
"In our pilot area, basically sight unseen, we've had over 40% consumer acceptance," Moore says. "We believe once they actually feel, touch and see the difference between dial-up interconnections and one offered over a gigabit infrastructure, it's night and day."
Of course it depends on a technology that, so far, has not had its feet held to the fire.
"We have a passion to take gigabit Ethernet to the edge of the Net so people can do all the applications they have been dreaming about for years and trying to do with less bandwidth: telecommuting, tele-education, tele-medicine," says Daines. "We're just starting our demo sites. The first one we're talking about is Grant County; the others aren't public yet."
Things are going well in Grant County.
"I have nothing but praise for them (World Wide Packets) simply because the product, ever since we've received it and started using it, works," says Moore. "I've had it in extreme hot temperatures here in the middle of Washington State and haven't missed a beat."
That's great news for folks in Grant County, Wash.
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