Municipal Utility Adds Telecommunications to Its Mix of Services

Hopkinsville Electric System (H.E.S.) is a public utility that distributes electricity to the rural town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Serving approximately 13,500 residential, industrial and commercial customers, H.E.S. recently found a cost-effective way to take advantage of its existing fiber infrastructure to expand its service offerings and meet the community's need for advanced telecommunications services. For H.E.S., this opened the door to new revenue streams with minimal additional investment. For the community's business customers, it meant affordable access to advanced communications services such as T1 and Internet access that would have otherwise been unavailable or too expensive.

When H.E.S. initially entered the market for fiber connectivity solutions such as fiber modems and digital cross connects for the project, it turned to the Internet, as well as system integrator Alcatel, for recommendations. The information search resulted in a short list of vendors that included RAD, Canoga Perkins, ADC and TC Communications. "Of these vendors, none offered the variety, flexibility and overall 'bang for the buck' that RAD did," says Roger Smith, Telecommunications Manager at H.E.S. "The fact that RAD offered a single-vendor solution played a key role in our decision to select their products."

Through ACE Tech, one of RAD's leading value-added resellers in the U.S., H.E.S. purchased and installed products from RAD's DXC, Optimux and FOM lines. H.E.S. combines these products to extend full and fractional T1 services, as well as Internet access, over fiber to business customers such as banks and to the local school district. "RAD's DXC-30 multiservice access nodes made a lot of sense for our fractional T1 applications. We could use one device to divide out timeslots and convert the signal to send to the customer," states Smith.

Smith continues to add RAD fiber optic products to H.E.S.'s telecommunications infrastructure, especially as the utility's telecommunications customer base grows. Notes Smith, "Because RAD offers a flexible ‘grow as you go' approach, we don't have to make investments in products that we do not need." Smith has shared his success story with fellow rural utilities from the nearby towns of Henderson and Owensboro, both of which have, through ACE Tech, installed RAD products for similar applications.