MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Starting in the mid 2010s, the State of Alabama began a concerted effort to connect rural parts of the state to the internet via high-speed broadband. Those efforts got supercharged when multiple rounds of COVID-19 relief packages showered the state with hundreds of millions that could be spent building out fiber lines throughout the state.
But it was a policy change, not an infusion of cash, that made a one of the biggest differences toward connecting rural communities, schools and hospitals. In 2019, the Alabama Legislature passed and Gov. Kay Ivey signed a new law allowing electric utility companies to offer high-speed internet to rural communities by way of their existing power networks. The law got utilities like Alabama Power, the Tennessee Valley Authority and regional electric cooperatives in the broadband game by allowing them to piggyback their existing networks with high-speed cable lines – and save the cost of having to run new fiber lines.
Arnab Ghosal is Vice President of Grid Transformation and Connectivity at Alabama Power, overseeing the company’s efforts to build out broadband via its existing infrastructure. In a recent conversation with Alabama Daily News, Ghosal explained the project and how it’s also about improving efficiency for electricity customers. Here’s our conversation.
ADN: Arnab, thanks for taking the time to talk with me. To start, just kind of give me a broad picture of your role there at the power company.
Arnab Ghosal: So I live in the power delivery world. So that’s the transmission and distribution wing of the company. And what our group does is a lot on the strategy side of our deployments, our technology deployments, to help, you know, grid benefits, reliability, and resiliency of the grid. So we use a lot of data analytics to drive that. We use a lot of technology out in the field that can get the lights on quicker, faster, so our customers have less impact when there’s a weather event. And so that’s really what we drive is that innovative wing of using data and technology that makes sense.
ADN: Yeah, you’re who we depend on when there is a weather event. We have them all the time in my neighborhood with all of the old trees, and I have noticed that over the years it has gotten faster.
How does that connect with broadband?
Arnab Ghosal: So as we put more technology out onto the grid, those devices need to communicate with one another. And you can imagine, just like in your home with all your widgets, there’s more and more data out there getting collected, and those devices need to be able to talk to each other very quickly, to be able to send signals.
So that’s where the fiber deployment for us becomes very critical when we’re collecting data, to get more insights from, you know, all of the devices out there, to be able to understand what they’re doing, what they’re seeing. And then when a tree falls on a line and you have to have a couple of different devices operate based on where that outage occurred so we can pick up other customers.
It uses fiber to talk to one another, to be able to tell each other, hey, you need to open, you need to close, so we can do basically automated restoration without even having anybody go out in the field.
So that’s where the fiber is very, very critical for us. It’s a communications medium.
ADN: Okay. So this seems to be happening in a few different ways. The state is in the middle of this huge effort to lay fiber lines, build out that middle mile in places where there is no infrastructure. And then yall and other utilities are laying fiber through and on top of existing power lines. Do I have that right?
Arnab Ghosal: So, you hit it for us. When you think about our fiber deployment, really, it brings value in a couple of different ways. One, what I just mentioned, like you said, we’re putting it on our distribution poles. We’re putting it on our transmission rights away for first and foremost, to help the electric grid communication.
And then what we do is where we have available fiber, we will look to partner with internet companies to get broadband out to our rural communities. So, grid first, then it’s, oh, how can we help the digital divide in Alabama?How can we get broadband to rural parts of our state through partnership? So we’ve partnered with various Internet companies that will use our available fiber, where we have it, and take fiber to the home. A couple of those folks are Freedom Fiber up in Fayette, Alabama to C Spire in Jasper to Point Broadband in the Opelika area. Those are some examples of, hey, it can help the grid and then we can help our community and we can help rural broadband all at the same time and really create that value from this asset.
ADN: Yeah, I remember the legislature passed a law in 2019 allowing utilities to, in this drive to get everybody connected, to kind of piggyback on their existing lines so that they don’t have to run all new lines. Was that a helpful law for what y’all are doing?
Arnab Ghosal: It is. It allows us to create those partnerships that I mentioned because not only now do we have rights away for electric purposes, which obviously that’s why we are here. We also have those rights away to help enable broadband. So, you know, that type of legislation is very impactful when you think about what it unlocks and then what it allows, you know, different companies, including us, to get into the space as a partner.
ADN: How would you rate or measure the progress so far?
Arnab Ghosal: Two things that jump out to me. From a grid reliability perspective, fiber has led to millions of minutes saved from a customer standpoint because of these automated schemes where oftentimes they are using fiber as a communications medium. When you talk about millions of minutes saved, that that’s very impactful. And then when I think about partnerships, we have over 10 different partnerships throughout the state, a couple of thousand customers right now that are going to be served off of Alabama Power fiber.
And then one of the biggest things we’ve done is we’re also a partner in the Alabama Fiber Network, our backbone. Fiber is help enabling the Alabama Fiber Network, get to all 67 counties in Alabama. So that’s a big deal. You know, that’s going to get folks broadband access that’s never had it before.
It’ll lower the cost of broadband and that’s getting built out right now by the Alabama Fiber Network. But they are using some of our fiber to help make that happen quicker because we have that infrastructure already in place in a lot of areas.
So hopefully I give you some measurements of thousands of customers, but then we’re eventually going to get to every county in Alabama and that’s just going to resonate more of impacting more and more people.
ADN: What’s your idea of success? When will we have made it and how far do you think we are away from that?
Arnab Ghosal: I think to make it on broadband it would need to be similar to an electric side. I mean, can you get everybody served with fiber to the home access to really change their quality and dynamic of where they live? I don’t think we’ve made it until we do that.
I think what the state has done, you hit it, through legislation, through different funding mechanisms to be able to even get the Alabama Fiber Network stood up – those are really, really big steps. You have the BEAD program coming, which is a last mile fiber program that’s going to be hitting Alabama. It’s already out there. The applications are open.
$1.4 billion coming to Alabama for last mile fiber. So when you start stacking those things, you start making a difference. Everybody’s got to have adequate broadband access and fiber access because the technology and data need is only going to grow.
When you think about what’s getting put inside people’s homes, how people learn, how people do telehealth, that’s only going to continue to grow. So we got to support that with the right broadband infrastructure.
ADN: What are some of the challenges y’all face in getting this very complicated task done?
Arnab Ghosal: I mean, some of it is just time. I mean, you’re building. It’s an infrastructure project. So timing is one thing.
How long does certain routes take, especially when you’re traversing the entire state in some cases. So I would point to that. And then it is finding people that are willing to partner and go to rural places in Alabama where there only might be five customers per mile.
So who’s going to go serve those folks? I think being able to find the right partners, and we found a lot of good ones, but we need to keep finding more and more people that are able and willing to go deep into Alabama, and some of this funding is what’s going to help do that.
I think in general, for the ISP folks and the Internet folks, it’s time and money. Right? That probably doesn’t come as a surprise there.
ADN: Sure. And it strikes me because I think most people probably think of Alabama Power as, you know, who you pay your for electricity and who you call when it gets cut off.
Arnab Ghosal: That’s right.
ADN: But this sounds like a more expanded role in terms of economic development, beyond just producing and selling electricity. Is that fair to say?
Arnab Ghosal: Absolutely. Anytime we can bring value to our customers and our communities, we want to do that. And this is just a perfect example of how you can do it in a multiple facets.
When you think about helping the grid, helping the community, helping economic development, and you can do all that in one shot with one infrastructure deployment. I mean, that brings a lot of impact value, and that’s the way we look at things.
That’s why we look at infrastructure, and that’s the way we look at our presence throughout the state and the various communities that we’re in and that we’re really lucky to serve.
ADN: We will be following this going forward so please let me know of any interesting developments. And thanks again for taking the time to help us understand this.
Arnab Ghosal: My pleasure, thank you.