[Virginia Power adds voice]
Check this out. We keep hoping the RBOCs will learn to dance and these guys are doing arabesques behind our backs:
<<<August 13, 1997
BY AKWELI PARKER, The Virginian-Pilot
Virginia Power, until now best known for hawking volts, is getting
into voice. The utility announced Tuesday that the State Corporation Commission approved its request to sell access on the company's fiber-optic network. The company will offer limited inter-exchange telecommunications services throughout the state via a new subsidiary, VPS Communications.
``As our economy transforms itself into an information-based
economy,'' the demand for telecommunications is skyrocketing,'' said William S. Mistr, president of VPS Communications.
Customers will likely include large companies, Internet service
providers, cellular and PCS providers and others who use big hunks of information pipeline.
``There is a tremendous demand for wholesale data hauling,'' said
Bill Byrd, a Virginia Power spokesman. The need has exploded in recent years with the advent of the Internet and the resultant traffic jams it puts on the public telecommunications network.
Virginia Power began setting up its 270-mile fiber-optic network in
the mid-1980s as an internal communications tool. As Byrd explained it, a company responsible for running nuclear power plants and supplying electricity to more than 1 million customers needed a way to talk and exchange data more reliably than what the phone company could serve up.
Virginia Power's fiber network stretches through a swath of urban
areas from the suburbs of Washington to Hampton Roads -- an area known as the``golden crescent.''
As early as 1989, Virginia Power brass realized they could turn the
network's data stream into a revenue stream. Advances in compression technology meant they had room not only for their own data, but also that of paying customers.
The network in effect allows users to bypass the local phone company and patch straight through to long distance providers. At the time though, state and federal laws forbade the company from selling its extra bandwidth.
Then last year the Telecommunications Act of 1996 blew the doors
off prior restrictions on would-be telecom providers.
``It made all the difference in the world,'' said Byrd of the
legislation.
Virginia Power filed its request with the SCC last October and had
it granted Friday.
Virginia Power isn't the only power provider to hop on the
telecommunications craze. In the face of industry restructuring, utilities are grasping for all types of ``bundling'' solutions to give consumers ``one-stop shopping.'' >>>
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