Way back in 1991 we discovered that our new broadband network was capable of being used as a local area network (LAN). That means we were able to establish communications between a few folks that already had home computers and the new file servers and educational software that the Glasgow schools had bought. It was very cool and novel. The technology we were using meant that we had to actually crack open the computers and install a communications card manufactured by IBM that was intended for connecting computers in a large building. Once we discovered that they would work across our network connecting thousands of buildings, things really started to happen.

In those early days one of the coolest things we could demonstrate was the ability to access Encyclopedia Britannica which Glasgow Board of Education had purchased and installed on a file server in one of their schools. Thinking back on it now, it seems pretty lame, but in 1991 it was a big deal. That demonstration drew a lot of nationwide attention. A lot of that attention came from the telecommunications giant (now deceased) MCI. After a few years of visits to Glasgow and discussions about why a city might decide to build its own broadband network, we got a very important phone call from an MCI executive named Vinton Cerf. He asked me to meet him for lunch in Reston, VA. During that lunch he asked if Glasgow had considered connecting its broadband network to the internet. I admitted that we had, but that we had no idea how to accomplish that. He offered to help us and, within a few weeks, MCI established the first connection between the internet and Glasgow’s broadband network. That was late 1994 and everything since then has been a bit of a blur.

That first connection was a T1 circuit. T1 is telecommunications jargon for a 1.5 megabit per second (Mbps) pathway between Glasgow and the internet. Today such a circuit would be suitable only for a handful of medium sized businesses, but from the beginning in 1994 through about 1996, one T1 circuit carried all of Glasgow’s internet traffic. If the internet is represented as the interstate highway system, the T1 circuit would be similar to a gravel driveway, but it was our only connection to the interstate. Glasgow has always suffered some from its geography. I-65 passed us by and so did the main line of the railroad, and, to a large extent, the internet passed us by as well. Even though today our connections to the internet are big and getting much bigger, we still are not a major node on the world wide web, and that is at the center of most of the internet service interruptions we sometimes experience here in Glasgow.

While our initial gravel driveway connection to the world has now grown from 1.5 Mbps to 150 Mbps (perhaps now the equivalent of a pretty wide two lane road with occasional passing lanes included), we still have issues with that road. For example, we had a problem with that road just Friday past. Continuing on the road metaphor, Glasgow EPB owns the broadband roads all over Glasgow and parts of Barren County, but our “interchange” with the nationwide interstate network is inside our network operations center right at our offices. There, Windstream and AT&T take ownership of the highway and transport all of our traffic to a massive toll booth in Louisville. There, all of our traffic encounters an AT&T router which examines each piece of email, gaming, news, pictures, or anything else you think of as internet traffic. That router then decides if the traffic is allowed to pass and gives it directions on where to go. The router is sort of like the gatekeeper guy in the Emerald City when Dorothy and the scarecrow and others (Toto too!) knocked on the door and asked for an audience with the Wizard. The router decides who gets to come in and who has to stay outside where that really spooky witch is cavorting about. Well, on Friday the router/gatekeeper guy got new orders from the Wizard (AT&T) that no one from Glasgow was allowed in. That is why you were unable to utilize your internet connection from about 2:30 p.m. until about 7:00 p.m. that day. Within an hour we were certain that the problem was with the instructions AT&T had given the router, but, since we neither own, nor control, AT&T, we simply had to call and beg and plead for several hours while they took their own sweet time sending new orders to the router.

Obviously, we don’t like being treated this way and we are constantly striving to provide redundancy and greater capacity on our local “roads” as well as our roadways connecting Glasgow to the world. We also want to free ourselves from the tyranny which exists when we allow one gatekeeper (AT&T) to control all of our access to the world. What we really need is multiple roads leading out of Glasgow which lead to multiple gatekeepers so that one set of bad instructions cannot render us unable to communicate with the world. For that matter, we really need the same sort of architecture for electric power as well. It might surprise you, but Glasgow has only one source of electricity today just like we have only one internet roadway to the world. Luckily, our electric power gateway, operated by TVA, is a bit more sorted out and less likely to get bad instructions than the guy operating the door at AT&T. Of course we would really like to have redundant feeds for both electric power and internet connectivity, and, that is precisely what we are working on. The only real problem with providing this redundancy is that it is expensive, and folks in Glasgow have grown accustomed to high speed, high reliability, and low cost. . .three things that are very difficult to arrange at the same time. Still, we are trying to accomplish them all.

Within the next month, we will be completing our own fiber optic circuit to Bowling Green and, in turn, to an AT&T router which is in Bowling Green. This will finally allow us nearly infinite capacity to the internet. It will be like having a new twenty lane connector from I-65 directly to the Bypass in Glasgow. As we move traffic off the old highway and onto this new one, it is possible that you may see some service interruptions. The only way I know to explain this is to compare it to construction on the interstate. All of those orange barrels and lower speed limits are frustrating during construction, but after it is over, man, the road is sooo nice! But still, initially our new road will still terminate at only one big AT&T router, so the possibility of bad instructions or other AT&T issues will still be a problem, but we have a plan for that as well.

Other major internet gateways also exist in Bowling Green, and we are working to establish redundant connections to them. Also, other cities like Hopkinsville, and Murray are building similar new roads to connect themselves to neighboring cities and we are working with them to interconnect our fiber to their’s. As that develops, we will eventually have fiber routes all the way to Nashville, and that will open the door for us to interconnect with many other competitive major internet gateways. So, the time is coming when one provider will not be able to totally cripple our internet access, but it is not coming tomorrow. There is work to do and money to be spent before we arrive in internet nirvana.

Peering a bit further over the horizon, it is possible to imagine a time when the interconnected cities might band together to establish themselves as a major internet gatekeeper on our own! If we are successful in bring that about, we may see the major internet content providers like Google, Yahoo, CNN, and others actually seek to locate some of their servers and connections on our fiber backbone. At the same time, if our infotricity idea takes hold, Glasgow might become the provider for advanced electric power metering services for all of the cities connected via the fiber backbone. All of these thing may lead to Glasgow having the most robust internet speeds and capacities in North America. All of these things are possible, but not guaranteed. Still, it is our intention to keep working on our roads and improving their capacity. This work will continue to provide benefits for you, and the occasional frustration. The former should far outweigh the latter, but don’t expect perfection. While no one works harder than we do to deliver the very best internet service possible, we are still human and we do sometimes make mistakes.

Last night the evening news ran a story about the possible demise of the airline industry. Fuel prices and weak economic conditions, they said, might cause two hundred cities to lose access to commercial airlines. The cost of the remaining air travel options might be so expensive that regular air travel by families for vacations and quick visits to distant cities might put such travel out of reach for all but the wealthy. As a former frequent flyer, this story left me feeling pretty sad.

After the news went off we went downtown to the courthouse square to take in a concert by our Glasgow Community Band. Walking down South Green Street toward the square, I couldn’t help but notice the infrastructure; the technology that makes Glasgow a community. There are the streets, sidewalks, utilities, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances, and many other technological wonders that we purchase for ourselves. These are the infrastructure items that we all count on and accumulate in a passive manner. That is to say, we pay for them with our taxes and utility bills, but are not generally personally involved in.

Those are nice, but the really wonderful elements of our infrastructure are the ones people provide from their inherent pride, generosity, talent, and commitment to improving the community without any direct benefit to themselves. Those include well maintained and renovated homes, lawns, and landscaping. Of course, the biggest item that was on display last night was the Community Band. That is Glasgow infrastructure as well, and it exists only because a handful of locals care enough about the rest of us to commit the time and energy necessary to allow their individual efforts to combine with those of others to produce beautiful music. Fire engines and utility lines are nice and useful, but anyone with enough money can buy them and all communities have them. Our Community Band is not something other towns have. It is special. It comes from that underlying current of civility and community that cannot be established with tax dollars. It is a special bit of technology that we are all so lucky to have.

Last night hundreds of locals sat on our own lawn, under a crystal blue sky, in front of the City Hall that we bought and paid for, and were entertained by a group of our fellow citizens simply because they could. Children giggled and waved blades of grass in unison with Bill Brogan as he waved his conductor’s baton. Friends and neighbors shared all of this with each other during an evening so perfect that you were expecting to wake up and find that you were dreaming. We all enjoyed the kind of evening that so many folks load themselves up into airplanes and travel great distances, at even greater expense, in the hope of experiencing. Many of the attendees did that just by walking down the street. We discovered vacation level happiness on a Tuesday night right here in Glasgow.

On the way back home I started thinking again about the evening news and the demise of the airline industry and the fact that more folks are going to need to find their entertainment at home. I pondered this as we walked back up South Green Street. I pondered the demise of cheap air travel and I finally said . . . who cares.

One thing is certain, the Glasgow EPB is a small operation. We consist of fifty folks with no interest in any customer outside the good old 42141 zip code. We serve homes and businesses that cover a total population of only about 16,000 folks. In the great big world of electric and cable utilities, we are laughably small. But that does not mean we don’t have a mighty big impact on the economy of Glasgow and the lives of those 16,000 folks. We have. We do, and, in the coming years, we will.

This year marks our twentieth anniversary in the cable television business. During those twenty years we have always made sure that the people of Glasgow pay the lowest rates for cable television service in the United States. Even though we just announced a modest rate increase of $1.50 per month which will become effective on July 1, we still blow away the competition. The Census Bureau just released this study relating to cable television popularity and the rates people pay for cable in our country. As you can see if you click on the link, the average cost of cable in 2006 was $41.17 per month. Since this is now 2008 it is very likely that figure is now about $45 per month. In Glasgow, even after our rate increase, you will be paying only $25.75 ($29.75 outside the City limits)per month for the expanded basic package. That differential between our rates and those we would otherwise be paying if we didn’t have our own little locally owned system has existed throughout the twenty year history of our cable efforts. As a result, we have saved the folks around here over $40 million since we got started in 1988! It is certainly worth pondering what Glasgow would look like today if an additional $40 million had left the local economy over the last twenty years. It is not an image I want to dwell on very long.

But saving the community money is not the be-all and end-all reason of our existence. We can do a lot more to make Glasgow a better place to live and we are doing a lot of that right now. You see, the EPB team today, just like the folks who worked so hard fifty years ago to bring the EPB into existence, believes strongly that small is beautiful and that a few determined folks at the helm of some pretty powerful technology can constantly improve the life of local folks. To a large extent our team is guided by the principles so eloquently espoused by the great Kentucky writer, Wendell Berry (who writes and farms in the community of Port Royal, just a couple of hours up the road from us). Just a few days ago he was on KET making an observation about our present fuel crisis and how it might finally bring about a change in the way we live our lives in that we might all be traveling a whole lot less. He said, “It is clear that we are going to have to enjoy the places where we are, and, since that is the case, we need to do a lot more work making the places where we are, enjoyable.” The EPB is executing plans to make Glasgow more enjoyable.

With respect to electric power, we are well on our way to building a second delivery point so that electricity will continue to be reliable and available for Glasgow’s future. Our planned solution is elegant in that it will provide twice as much capacity as we have today should Glasgow continue to rampantly grow, yet it will also offer a much more efficient solution if our growth is stagnant or if we actually shrink. So, whatever direction our energy usage takes, we are planning an enjoyable and efficient solution.

We think that another way to make Glasgow more enjoyable in a world of $4 and $5 gasoline will be an enhanced internet and LAN system capable of affording more folks a way to work from home and leave the car or SUV parked in the garage. As this is written we are anxiously awaiting new fiber connections being installed along the TVA transmission line to Bowling Green and new cable modem management hardware and software to drastically improve the data throughput of our broadband network right here in Glasgow.

Finally, it is obvious from the Census Bureau report that increased access to cable television programming is another thing that folks find enjoyable, and we have some great things coming in that department as well. The $1.50 per month increase is going to allow us to bring some new and exciting products for your enjoyment! Very soon PBS Kids Sprout will come to our digital tier of programming and along with it will come 24 hour a day access to great preschooler programming like “Sesame Street” and “Bob the Builder” and some new characters being developed for the channel by the Muppet folks at Jim Henson Company. “The Pajanimals” will be part of the network’s “Good Night Show” block, and, as a relatively new grandparent, I can testify that Glasgow will be more enjoyable at my house when there is new programming to convince certain grand-daughters to go to sleep before I do! In addition to Sprout we will also be adding Golf Channel HD, VS HD, and it is quite likely that we will also be adding (drum roll please). . . The Disney Channel sometime in June. That’s right. After refusing to pay the exorbitant rates employed by the Disney folks for many, many years, we are finally about to cave in to the power of Hannah Montana. She got us in a headlock and we finally are about to say uncle. So, for those of you who spell additional enjoyment M-I-C-K-E-Y, Glasgow is about to get more enjoyable for you too.

There are other great things coming to your cable service as well. For example, our digital channel 103 (Discovery Home) is about to become Planet Green. This will be a channel which is calling itself the first 24-hour channel dedicated to eco-friendly living. The folks at Discovery are making a big bet here that “eco-tainment” will appeal to viewers. I think it will. Then later this year we hope to roll out our newest cable television service, VOD (Video On Demand) which will give all of our digital customers a nearly unlimited menu of movies and other programming that they can watch whenever they feel like it.

All told, the EPB is working hard to make your life in Glasgow more enjoyable and to ease your pain from beginning the process of withdrawing from a life spent traveling to another location in search of enjoyment. We think Glasgow can be plenty enjoyable! Stick with us and let us show you how.

The record heat wave of August has done more than killing off our grass and flowers, it has evaporated the shroud which has hidden some of the dirtiest secrets of the energy business. You say you have not noticed this? You will, dear readers, you will.

Before we get too deep into this newsletter, I want to admit that it was heavily influenced by a book by Bill McKibben, Deep Economy. It is a fantastic book and is largely responsible for any traces of wisdom that might be found herein.

On the surface, TVA’s philosophy about the energy business, since the mid-70's, has operated on one consistent maxim: All good things come from relentless growth. Over the last couple of years, and in particular over the last month, even TVA has begun to realize that More no longer always equals Better. In fact, More is becoming much more closely aligned with Miserable than Better.

How did we arrive at this point? Well, it took a lot of commitment to the belief that More always brings Better by TVA management over several decades. They pursued that belief in many, many ways. They started, but then soon killed, a home weatherization program that was doing a great job of helping homes use less energy (Why? Because it was not producing More sales of energy!), they operate a hyper-aggressive industry recruitment program that has never seen an industry they did not think would look great in any TVA community, but the worst damage has been done by the rate structure they implemented about 15 years ago. Everyone in the energy business knows that power costs more to produce and deliver during certain hours of the day when overall usage peaks. TVA knows that too, but instead of recognizing that reality and creating a rate environment which acknowledges that and charges us proportionately, they use a simple rate that ignores that reality and, instead, sends everyone the message that all energy costs the same thing, no matter when you use it.

So, if you send out the message every month that there is an unlimited supply of electricity and you should use a lot of it and use it whenever you want, what would you guess might happen? That’s right! We all started to use a lot more energy. In fact, even with some large industries in Glasgow shutting down and scaling back, we continue to set new record peak electrical demands every year (we set four new all-time records in August alone). Electric power usage has grown so much that TVA soon is selling more electric power than they can produce. So, what do they do? They go out on the open market and buy more expensive power from their neighbors! That’s right, during the peak hours of the day in Glasgow there is a high likelihood that the electricity keeping your air conditioner running is actually coming from KU or LG&E or any of a number of neighboring systems.

So did this shortfall cause TVA to begin questioning if More always leads to Better? Nope.
In fact, in the midst of this shortage, TVA is actually offering some large customers an incentive to add additional machinery and buy more power (I swear I am not making this up!)! In TVA’s world, it makes perfect sense to pay a customer to add electricity demand, then sell that customer power during peak times at a price far lower than their cost of buying that power from others. That is the power of unlimited belief in More always brings Better.

TVA is not the only villain in this play. There are examples of this faulted dedication to that old belief in many other segments of our economy. Certain elements of our banking industry have felt that more home construction and speculation is always better too. Heard about the fear in our financial markets due to the sub-prime mortgages and the spiraling examples of folks in default on the payments (these defaults jumped 93% in July compared to July of 2006)? This is just another example of business pursuing More at all costs. In the real world, everyone cannot afford the house they wish for. Still, many financial institutions have been lending out money at great risk, counting on the belief that More loans will equal Better profits in all cases. Somehow, no one bothered figuring out where we were going to get the money to pay for all the money we were being offered. That is just as wrong, and just as damaging to our economy, as TVA believing that selling more energy at a cost lower than their cost of buying it, while paying some of us to use more, will result in more prosperity for us all. The actual result is greater cost for most of us in return for savings and increased profit for a few. The folks being hired to build new power plants are not complaining!

You will personally experience this matter on October 1 when TVA’s “fuel cost adjustment” mechanism will increase your electric rates by about 5% to help them pay for the increased cost of coal, and other fuels, and the massive cost of the power they have been buying from the neighbors to supply the demand they encouraged us to create, but that they did not have the capacity to produce. In this case More did lead to Better, just not for us, rather, for the stockholders of LG&E and the other companies that sold the power to TVA. Does that make you feel better?

While this 5% increase is only part of their quarterly adjustment pattern, which means it technically could go away three months later, the impact on Glasgow’s economy is dramatic. In just three months this increase will cost our community more than $320,000! While we struggle with trying to save the community $200,000 per year by not adding cable programming like The Disney Channel and Fox Sports South, TVA’s devotion to More can sweep $320,000 out of the community in three months without even so much as a thank-you note. These are the kinds of defeats that make the battle hard to continue. No matter how hard we fight for our community’s economy, someone bigger and more powerful is always there to squash our efforts.

So, as we wind down the summer which brought us more heat, more energy consumption, more water consumption, more fear of collapse of our financial system, and more realization that our bridges, highways, electric networks, and other crucial infrastructure needs more maintenance, we contemplate whether the road to More can still take us to the land of Better. Do the people of Minneapolis now want more roads which can be named after some fat-cat politician, or would they like to have the money spent for unglamorous maintenance work on existing bridges? Do the people longing for their lost loved ones in collapsed coal mines want us to burn more coal which leads to even more risky mining activity? Do you want to keep paying more for electricity so that TVA can continue to reward some folks for using more energy? Clearly, some of us are learning about the peril of unflagging devotion to More. More does not lead to Better in 2007, and it likely never will again. Since us regular folk are now beginning to understand this, maybe we can start helping our leaders understand this as well. So let me be the first to utter this strange new theory . . . Less might actually lead us to Better.