Thursday, September 11, 2008

EPB Web Portal – Your door to a new world of information – Chapter 1

Since you are viewing this blog, which is exclusive to the folks who are part of the EPB fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) initiative, then you also have access to some truly unique and exciting features. First and foremost, you have access to our “web portal,” and that gives you access to features that very, very few other homes in the United States have access to.

While we certainly hope that the portal was fully explained when your home was converted to FTTH, it is certain that a lot of information was covered at that time and that you might need a bit of a “refresher course.” We hope that this blog will provide that refresher and also act as a constant resource for you to return to when you have questions about your new services.

You can access the portal through a variety of means. You can type in www.glasgow-ky.com/portal in your web browser (you can also just click on the blue highlighted “link” in this post) and it will take you to the sign-on screen. You can also just look for the EPB Web Portal link on the www.glasgow-ky.com home page (by the magic our folks do here at the EPB, when you are at a home which is connected to FTTH, this special link appears on the Glasgow homepage while it is not shown on others sites not connected to FTTH), right in the middle of the page just below the "What's On EPB Cable" section. No matter how you get there, the first screen you see is the sign-on screen where you must enter your username and password. Call us if you have lost these and we will get them to you, but they should have been furnished to you when your FTTH connections were installed.

Once you have typed in your username and password, the next screen opens up with summaries of the latest posts from the EPB Red, Blue & Green Blog/Newsletter, as well as tabs for other local and national news; but the really cool stuff is in the little red box on the left side of the page. Let’s start off by talking about the link “My Account.” Click on that link and you initiate a reading of your own electric meter and you immediately see the results. The default tab that opens next is “My Stats” and it gives you a brief summary of your electric power consumption, expressed in kWh and in dollars, for your home since the beginning of the present billing month. While that information is good for a quick check of how you are doing for the month and the present day, the really exciting information is found under the other tab by clicking on “Dashboard.” Go ahead and click! You are not going to hurt anything!

The next post to this blog will give you a detailed explanation of the new “dashboard” for your home. Stay tuned!