UtiliCorp Taps Advent

JIM BARTHOLD

UtiliCorp Communication Services, a power company entering the competing telecommunications services field, has selected Advent Networks to give it an edge as it overbuilds existing voice, video and data providers.

Specifically, UtiliCorp chose Advent's patent-pending, all-digital, switched Ethernet over hybrid fiber passive coax UltraBand technology and plans to roll it out in the Kansas and Missouri suburbs surrounding Kansas City early next year.

UltraBand is a broadband high-speed data delivery mechanism with bandwidth to spare but does not use cable modems.

"When somebody takes the UltraBand network and tries to compare it to a DOCSIS cable modem, it's a lot like taking your fingernails and scratching them down a blackboard," says Dave Pangrac, a veteran Time Warner Cable engineer and Advent's CTO/co-founder.

UltraBand's network delivers 5 to 40 Mbps to the side of the house.

"It's switched-stream video," Pangrac says. "You can select from any of the input sources that you want. It's not only video, it's interactive anything, and it shows up on your TV set, not just your computer."

UltraBand "looks more like a dedicated path to the house because that's exactly what it is," he says. "We're transporting information to the home in large quantities that can be mixed in various ways. It's Ethernet-based. It's switched at the headend."

The node size is the key, Pangrac says.

"If 100% of the homes subscribe to the service, then you have 100 home nodes," he says. "Our goal has always been that the network has to be simple. It cannot have a lot of active parts because active parts tend to be a constraint to technology, plus they're very difficult to maintain."

UltraBand indirectly springs from Pangrac's work with Time Warner's Full Service Network in Orlando, Fla. It's not something an established service provider in rebuild mode would use, but it works for UtiliCorp.

"We're going out and building the local loop to the home and saying, `What's there today isn't good enough,'" says Ken Johnson, UtiliCorp's VP-technology services. "The only way to deliver this technology is to put in new cable plant."

Although UtiliCorp serves energy customers in and around Kansas City, it's building the converged network in unserved areas and marrying speed and convenience with a low price tag.

"If you subscribed to Time Warner, used Southwestern Bell for your local phone and any number of people for Internet, at the high end of those services you have to be paying anywhere between $140 and $170 a month," says Jeff Ingram, VP-business development for UtiliCorp. "We can get to a point where we offer a bundle of those services anywhere between 12% to 20% less."

UltraBand's switched media technology builds a foundation that can handle IP services as they emerge, Johnson says.

"As we move to true interactive services, then the framework is laid through this infrastructure to move to a pure on-demand, IP-based system and eliminate shared services," he adds. "Then you do video switching at the node."

UtiliCorp considered building a traditional hybrid fiber/coax plant but decided against the idea.

"Cable TV reliability isn't so hot," Johnson says. "It's spectrum-based. It's not put together to do data. The Internet is IP-centric, but there's not a good last-mile delivery method. What you're really trying to do is create a topology that's service-independent and allows you to react to new services that come onto the market very quickly."