Grant sees the light

When the Grant County, Wash., Public Utility District started attaching its 35,000 electric accounts to a two-way fiber optic network, it knew it was taking a chance. Monitoring electrical and gas functions wouldn't repay the investment.

For a one-time $300 fee, the utility installed residential gateways capable of handling a gigabit of two-way Ethernet capability on select subscriber homes. For an ongoing $40 per month, those subscribers can negotiate with service providers to deliver voice, video and data over those networks.

“We offer unbundled plant, and the consumer makes arrangements for any number of service providers,” said Jonathan Moore, the utility's senior telecommunications engineer.

Of course, that requires some service providers to step up to the bar and get involved.

“We were out there trying to solicit and make something happen to get it going,” Moore said. “Putting together a headend can be an expensive ordeal.”

Benton County Rural Electrical Association of nearby Prosser, Wash., went for it.

Benton operates a dial-up ISP service in Grant County. It will use Myrio's hardware and software to enhance that to a high-speed Internet offering that includes voice and 90 channels of entertainment video.

“We're offering video-on-demand and high-speed Web access to the TV and PC, e-mail, personal video recording capability… all the software that enables them to deliver these services to the home,” said Robert Manne, Myrio's president and CEO, who noted the network also would host caller ID on the TV later this year.

Myrio's equipment includes set-top boxes made in Germany by Fujitsu Siemens, as well as all the headend gear and software, Manne said. The service is now in a trial phase, so prices won't be established for the next several months. Benton REA charges $19.95 per month for dial-up services.

While Benton BEA's offering will be the first such package in Grant County, it won't be the last, Moore said.

“Spark Interactive, doing business as Northwest Broadband, has built a video headend here and is getting ready to start deploying video-on-demand, multimedia, cable TV-type service,” Moore said. “Another company, Video Internet Broadcasting, announced that they, too, had plans to do that in our area.”

Grant County's network can handle that — and more.

“We're using VLANs [virtual local area networks] as a means of carrier separation so that we have a totally open-access, convergent voice, video and data competitive service that operates over the same network,” Moore said. “We provide the fiber and the gateway to the side of the premises. The user simply connects via standard Cat 5 cable up to eight ports, and we'll assign each one of those specific ports a VLAN identifier.”

This would be radical in the most sophisticated area. For Grant County, which is so rural some people don't have telephone service, it's almost unthinkable.

“Now people can have multiple high-definition TVs in their homes,” Manne said. “It just opens up the path to that home for all the more advanced entertainment features.”

And a rural electrical association will be the first to deliver them.

“To a lot of people, it may seem odd that a consumer-owned public utility like Benton REA is involved in providing cutting-edge technology that exceeds what will be available in Seattle,” Dawsey said.

It's part of the utility's legacy.

“We provided light to areas in darkness,” Dawsey said. “Today, we're stepping forward again with cutting-edge technology that will light the dark side of the digital divide.”