Breaker, breaker - what's your URL?

In 1995, Park 'N View started providing cable TV to truckers at a truck stop in Florida.

"The idea was, we've got 1.5 million over-the-road truckers that are out on the road an average of 24 days a month and basically turning the back of their cab into a bedroom every night. So let's figure out how to give these guys a cable entertainment offering," said Ted Shremp, marketing director for PNV.net.

Today Park 'N View - rechristened PNV.net and newly made public - offers in-cab cable and telephone services at 730 truck stops nationwide, provides Internet access at 230 of those and adds about seven or eight new accounts monthly.

Cable service led to phone - first 800 numbers for calling dispatchers and then long-distance services, with the last stop being the Internet.

"When we added dial-tone in the cab, we noticed that a good number of our drivers were going online," Shremp said. "Most of these truck stops are in rural areas, so it's difficult to get a local access number. It was just logical to upgrade our headend at each of these sites, put in a modem bank and basically become an Internet service provider."

PNV.net research finds that 52% of its 120,000 customers own a PC, and about 25% of them have a laptop in their cabs.

Each PNV.net-equipped truck stop consists of two components. The first is a mini-headend on the cable side that pulls down a signal from direct broadcast satellite company EchoStar. The signal is run through an RF modulator and distributed over a coaxial network to bollards, which are ground-mounted jacks for cable and phone. The company offers either basic cable or premium channels without the need for a set-top box by running off an A/B switch in the pedestal box.

"When you're driving a truck, you don't want to be tossing around a $200 set-top," Shremp said.

The second component is voice and Internet services provided by a customer premises equipment switch running proprietary software that sends the dial tone and interactive voice response capability to each bollard. The company connects every site to AT&T's Internet backbone via a T-1 line and frame relay and manages the entire network from a network operations center in Coral Springs, Fla. For big maintenance tasks such as a burned-out router, PNV.net contracts with 25 field technicians around the country; for minor repairs - a misaligned satellite dish - most big truck stops have their own staff.

PNV.net customers pay a $10 membership fee to get the necessary connections from a vending machine in the truck stop and then can prepay $5 for a day's basic cable or $10 for premium cable. For $20, they get unlimited basic cable TV at any PNV.net site and 15 minutes of long-distance service for one month. For $30, they get basic and premium channels and 30 minutes of long-distance.

PNV.net also sells the service to trucking fleets as a driver retention perk and as a way to cut 800-number access charges. "The fleets are very sensitive to payphone access surcharges," Shremp said. "The average fleet call is about 2.5 minutes long, so you could be getting the best per-minute rate in the world, but you've still got a 25cents pay phone surcharge to deal with."

With Internet access, drivers can log onto their company's intranet via their laptops - or one of several Internet kiosks PNV.net now is testing - and get new assignments. Kirt Kaufmann, an independent owner-operator, looks for truck stops he knows have PNV.net facilities. "Before, dispatchers paged me, and I had to find a pay phone and call three or four times to get through," he said. "Now, I sign off on a new load before I've dropped the old one. I get a lot more sleep - maybe because I drink a lot less coffee while waiting for a pay phone."