Chapter Four of Seven

 Being There

An Autobiographical Account of My Life and Times at Glasgow EPB

William J. Ray

CHAPTER FOUR

With the attention to our accomplishments came a steady increase in the number of companies that wanted to schedule a visit to Glasgow, or they wanted to schedule me to come to their meeting to tell the Glasgow story. I testified before House and Senate Committees relative to proposed legislation to reign in the cable television, telephone, and programming companies, and that notoriety attracted even more interest in Glasgow EPB. One of the companies who repeatedly visited us was a group from MCI. They were a powerhouse telecommunications firm back then. After several visits from MCI executives in the early 90s, I got a call from a very important MCI executive named Vinton Cerf. I did not know it at the time, but Vinton Cerf co-developed the language of the internet, TCP/IP. Cerf wanted me to fly to his office just outside Washington, DC, for lunch and a chat. I accepted that invitation and was quite surprised to learn that Glasgow’s work was being deeply studied by his team at MCI, and he wanted to know if we would be interested in becoming the MCI test site for delivering high-speed internet access via broadband and a yet-to-be-manufactured device called the cable modem. At the time, I had never even seen the internet, nor had anyone on the EPB team, but it seemed like a great opportunity to partner with a very big company with a lot of resources. We accepted the offer, and it became one of the pivotal events in my career, and in the life of Glasgow and Glasgow EPB.

Within a few weeks, MCI had provisioned high speed links to Glasgow, and we connected them to our broadband network. We found about ten friendly customers who already had a PC in their home, and who were willing to allow us to crack that PC open and install an experimental card in the bus, which would interface with our coaxial cable network. The results, even from the beginning, were phenomenal. We knew this was going to be a very big product, yet we were clueless as to what people would pay for it, we also didn’t know what our expense of providing the service would be, and we certainly didn’t know that so many homes and businesses would want the service. As we began to carefully offer the service in 1995, we soon realized that we were holding a tiger by the tail. It also became the firm foundation upon which we stood to see a sustainable future for Glasgow, and the world outside it.

Totally documenting the struggles and the amazing growth of the internet business, after its 1995 inception, would take too many pages. Suffice to say that Glasgow EPB’s involvement in the internet access business via its broadband network became far bigger than Vinton Cerf first suggested at the fateful lunch. Glasgow became famous again, as it was proclaimed the most wired city in America, by several publications. The business changed the EPB team, as our hunger for even more bright young people intensified, but it also changed virtually every home and business in Glasgow. High speed internet became available, and high-expertise support from EPB made the availability usable for everyone, as we continued the democratization of technology. 

The rates we set for the internet products began, and remain, far below what peers charge for similar products. In 25 years, the net income from the booming internet business began to exceed the net income produced by the contracting electric power business. That seems impossible, but such growth and opportunities came to pass from having the right Mayors, appointing the right Board members, who supported EPB management in finding and retaining the right team. All those elements existed, and they combined to produce the greatest results imaginable for the Glasgow citizens. Since the beginning of the cable television and internet services, the low rates offered by EPB have saved the citizens of Glasgow over $70 million and that amount continues to grow.

It is impossible to know just how Glasgow’s early availability of high-speed internet impacted hundreds of other businesses in Glasgow, but we know it did and it enhanced their ability to compete. The availability of high-speed LAN/WAN connectivity also enabled us to create BITS, the community GIS mapping consortium that also gave birth to our Enhanced 911 system. That too came from a now old-fashioned spirit of cooperation between EPB, FRECC, Glasgow Water Company, Barren County Schools, City of Glasgow and Barren County Fiscal Court. No other community had, nor do they have today, anything like it. We have leaders like Jackie Browning, Doc Nichols, Woody Gardner, Charlie Campbell, and Charlie Honeycutt to thank for having this system.