Huntsville to become Gig City with Google Fiber

Jay Stowe, CEO of Huntsville Utilities, speaks at press conference announcing Huntsville, Ala. will become a Gig City with Huntsville Utilities building a fiber network and Google Fiber bringing high speed TV & internet service to Huntsville residents and businesses. The press conference was held under the Saturn V rocket at the Davidson Center at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center Feb. 22, 2016. (Bob Gathany/bgathany@AL.com)

(Bob Gathany)

Google Fiber could begin streaming high-speed Internet service in Huntsville as early as March, but expanding the fiber cable network that allows the service through Madison County could take the rest of this decade - or longer.

That's the implication of an interview with departing Huntsville Utilities CEO Jay Stowe. Stowe sat down with AL.com last week before leaving his post with the utility to become a senior vice president with TVA.

Stowe discussed Huntsville Utilities' primary goal - a fiber-based smart utility grid - for which excess capacity leased to Google Fiber is both funding source and timeline accelerator. He said the smart grid will take three years to build now instead of 10 years, and it will mean new smart meters for homes in a rollout starting in Huntsville in 2017.

Fiber optic cable is a bundle of multiple, coated glass fibers. Internet signals are flashed down those fibers at the speed of light and then translated into words, images or music on the receiving end, much as semaphore signals were flashed from ship to ship at light speed and translated into words.

The utility has divided the city into six districts for fiber installation. "We should have the first section up and running in the early March time frame," Stowe said, referring to northwest Huntsville. After that, crews will start working in multiple districts at the same time.

"They will have access to fiber to light in March of next year," Stowe said of Google Fiber. So far, Google Fiber isn't saying if it will offer Gigabit Internet service to individual districts as they come online.

"We will run it past every address inside the city of Huntsville initially and we'll go to serve some of our largest facilities out in the county ... and we've had some early discussions with the county and the city of Madison," Stowe said of fiber cable, "but there's so much going on with the build of this. Sometime in the next 12- to-18 months, we'll have to start having further discussions about how could we expand the fiber system more aggressively outside the city of Huntsville. That'll come over time, but we're not there yet."

Stowe said the city itself needs 1,100 miles of cable, another reason it will take time. "We had to draw the line somewhere," he said of the first phase. "So, we drew a line here because it's easily controllable...."

When Huntsville's model is working, "we can replicate that in Madison and Madison County and make that grow," Stowe said. "I think in the next year we'll figure out how it works and start to build a team to expand (it). The last thing we want to do is get a program that's not working and make it bigger."

Today, Stowe said Huntsville Utilities provides electricity to the entire county, "water (to) the city limits and a little bit more and (natural) gas (to) the city limits and a little bit less."

Google Fiber has not committed to go beyond Huntsville, but the city is talking to other companies interested in leasing extra fiber capacity. And to build its smart grid, the utility will want a fiber "backbone" where it provides electricity: countywide. The backbone is complete in Huntsville now, and crews are taking fiber down to the neighborhood level.

Stowe gave Huntsville's definition of "smart grid" after noting that, "If you sit down 200 people, you get 100 definitions" of the term.

"For us, it allows us to see where there's problems, where there's water leaks faster, to save that energy and the cost. It allows us to check pressure in our gas system more quickly and make control changes. It will allow us to turn on and off sections of our electric system, so if there's an outage we can turn people on more quickly," Stowe said. "If a tree falls on a line, a crew will always have to go out and fix that. But if we have switches in place, we can turn lots of people on that circuit ahead of time."

Stowe said there are "things we haven't even dreamed of yet that will help make the system better over the next 10 years, once we get the fiber in."