Electric utilities and fiber optics -- why?

99+% of the web sites covering optical fiber telecommunications are devoted to telephone company networks, cable TV or internal corporate local area networks. Why do we have one covering electric utilities?

Power utilities are important players behind the scenes of the continent's fiber grids.

In fact, electric utilities and municipalities own about 5 to 10% of the fiber deployed in the U.S. and Canada. Almost every large investor-owned or government utility has extensive fiber networks. Even most small utilities with more than 10,000 customers have their own fiber networks. First, power utilities as a group historically have usually been phone companies' biggest or second biggest customers. Second, power utilities are in a unique position to play an important and profitable part in the increasingly important telecommunications revolution.

Since they already own the rights-of-way, the poles and the towers, power utilities can install fiber optic cables alongside their powerlines much more economically than other companies trying to start from scratch in the telecommunications arena. For many of the associated maintenance and construction tasks, they can use the human resources they already employ to manage their power systems, supplemented in some cases either by using outside consultants with specialized skills or by hiring specialists for their own staffs.

Electric power lines reach every conceivable telecommunications customer, so power utilities can more economically compete with the traditional phone company than new telecommunications startups building their own networks.

Some utilities just use their fiber for their own internal telecommunications needs, which are considerable, as noted earlier. Others lease extra fibers in their cables to competitive telecommunications companies, thus acting as "carriers' carriers"; this makes money for them while keeping construction costs down for their carrier customers. In many markets, utilities have moved beyond the carriers' carrier business to serving large corporate or institutional clients in competition with the traditional local phone company.

Recently, a few utilities have decided to break to break the decade-old logjam on high speed communications to the home; since the phone company or cable TV company won't do this, they will. They are running fiber lines directly to their residential customers' homes. Direct fiber connections to the Internet with speeds of 100 Megabits per second or more make cable TV modems and DSL lines services seem puny in comparison. Customers with fiber to their home can now download any of thousands of movies on demand.

Utility fiber networks have the additional advantage of being more reliable. The cables used are stronger than traditional fiber cables and they are located high on the poles or towers, literally guarded by high voltage lines.

Working with fiber optics in power utility environments requires overlapping understanding of not just fiber optic technology but also electrical power transmission and distribution since the fiber cables are so closely integrated physically and operationally with the utilities power operations.

Few people in fiber optics or power understand both worlds, but we do. It's a fascinating and dynamic field to specialize in and we've enjoyed helping it grow and evolve for over a decade.

For more information on what power utilities are doing with telecommunications and broadband, check out Community Broadband Networks, a weblog we sponsor that carries the latest utility telecom news and information.