freepress.net - It’s not sunny every day and money doesn’t sprout from trees in Kutztown, Pa., but for cable and Internet fiends, it may be considered paradise.
That’s because Kutztown’s fiber-optic television, phone and Internet infrastructure is a decade ahead of its time and is still one of the few municipal fiber-optic networks in the United States.
And though Verizon has picked up on the benefits of a fiber-to-the-home system and begun investing billions of dollars in the technology, it is systems like Kutztown’s that showed how advantageous a FTTH system is.
Not only does Kutztown’s Hometown Utilicom FTTH system cost less than most cable providers — a customer pays $18 per month for basic cable and $35 per month for expanded cable — but it also has capabilities that can make it relevant decades into the future. Customers on the system also get free digital and high-definition channels if they have a digital TV or HDTV.
First hatched in 1996, the Hometown Utilicom network in Kutztown was designed as a “talking” electric system, where if a transformer malfunctioned, it’d communicate with the main system and be easy to trace, said Frank Caruso, Kutztown’s director of information technology.
