Council hears request to create BPU Digital Infrastructure Division
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The Jamestown Board of Public Utilities is looking to create a sixth division in connection to their fiber project.
BPU General Manager Kris Sellstrom came to the latest city council work session to discuss ongoing work on the project with the council, and the wish to create the new Digital Infrastructure Division.
"We're probably going to have a request for you all to look at a local law to establish the Digital Infrastructure Division for the BPU," Sellstrom said. "We're calling it the Digital Infrastructure Division because fiber is one component but there might be wireless pieces in the future."
A local law request would facilitate the creation of the division, and officially make it the BPU's sixth division. Sellstrom said the fiber project itself has been making a lot of progress with 4,000 service drops installed already, with many more to go before the end of the year. Over 700 customers are online now, and Sellstrom said the BPU is getting to the point where they need to create the division to establish the way to manage it.
"Like all of our divisions there are separate enterprise funds," Sellstrom said. "They all stand alone, so we want to make sure that the customers of the fiber division or the Digital Infrastructure Division are the ones that are paying for the cost (of the service). That's primarily the main reason to separate it out."
The division would work the same as the other divisions run by the nine-member BPU board. There are a few different options for the monthly charge for the BPU's fiber service, with the BPU being the open-access provider. This means they provide the infrastructure and charge the internet service providers a fixed rate per connection. The service providers can currently offer up to four speeds, but in the future Sellstrom said they will be able to offer more. There are different price options depending on the server, and Sellstrom added that the providers can provide different services as well.
Additionally, it is not too late to sign up for the BPU's service, with 90 days of free internet available if signed up by the end of October. There are about 8,000 more service drops to go, Sellstrom said, which people are able to opt out of, but there has been an overall positive reception from the community.
"The service drop is, there is about a quarter inch cable, it's a black cable, that comes from the pole, it hits your house, and runs down the outside of your house to a small, round, it looks like a turtle shell, on the side of your house," Sellstrom said. "So if you have that turtle shell on the side of your house you are ready to go and can log into the jamestownbpu/fiber. You can log in, sign up to get your in-home installation done."
To sign up people are required to go to the jamestownbpu.com/fiber, put their address in, sign the access agreement which allows the BPU to come on their property, and sign up for the internet service wanted. There is a current backlog of customers waiting, so Sellstrom said right now they expect to continue to do installations until the end of October, with the work being done by separate contractors, who are doing about 50 or 60 a week. Only about 150 people in the BPU's service area have chosen to opt out so far.
Right now, there is not currently any staff specifically for the division, which is why Sellstrom said they are looking to create it, and the current BPU staff are pulling extra weight to try and get everything set and online. Once the division is created they can start looking at staffing and getting everything ready to go.
There are two providers available through the BPU's fiber service, with a third interested and Sellstrom said once they have more customers they will be able to get more providers. The internet service providers themselves will be the ones doing most of the interactions with customers, but Sellstrom said if there was an outage and the providers could not resolve it it will escalate to the operations center, currently being done by Entry Point. If Entry Point cannot solve it, the BPU will be called to dispatch existing crews to go solve it if there is something such as a wire down.
Sellstrom talked a bit more with the council about equipment and devices involved with the fiber service, along with the customer portal, routers, and the anticipated annual revenue before wrapping up. He said it is expected to have a local law resolution for the council in regards to establishing the division next month.