EPB Web Portal – Your door to a new world of information – Chapter 2

Greetings, FTTH customers! It is time for another update on some of the special features you can access via your fiber connection to the EPB. The last post was about your special internet portal and the world of information available to you there. We talked about your access to the portal via this link and the statistical information about your energy consumption under the tab labeled “My Account.”

This post is going to be about the wonderful dashboard interface that we invented right here in Glasgow. Go ahead and sign in to the portal using your username and password and then click on the “My Account” tab and then click on the “Dashboard” tab. What you see next is a graphical representation that is designed to mimic the dashboard of your car. Of course, in your car you see information about the performance of the car. On the FTTH web portal dashboard you see information about the performance of your home!

Each time you visit the dashboard area of the portal, the electric meter on your home sends information about your consumption to the graphical “meters” on your dashboard. On the upper left is the main summary of your energy costs. The black hand represents the cost of electricity for the day, so far. The red hand indicates the amount of electricity, in dollars, you have consumed so far this month. On the upper right you see the black needle pointing to the present electric power consumption of your home and the red needle indicates the maximum your home has used during any fifteen minute period of the month so far. As time of use electric rates are developed and offered (sometime in early 2009), this information will be very useful as you try to exploit those new rates and lower your energy bill.

The dial on the left side of the middle of the dashboard is your CO2 meter. Since TVA burns coal to produce your electric power, this meter is just there to inform you of your homes contribution of carbon dioxide to our atmosphere due to your energy consumption. This can be a sobering reminder of our own contributions to the gases that are contributing to global climate change. Right in the middle of the dashboard is your Efficiency meter. Put simply, this meter measures the ratio of your peak energy usage for the month compared to your total energy usage. Future electric rates will award the lowest energy costs to those who can keep their efficiency the highest. Creating an energy usage profile that is low and relatively constant, will result in high Efficiency readings on this meter and lower costs for energy.

Finally, at the bottom of the dashboard is a graphic presentation of your hourly energy usage for the present day. This can be very interesting. You can normally see your air conditioning and heating systems cycling on and off. If you have an electric water heater you will see it come on and heat water right after you take a shower or wash clothes. This information, combined with the Efficiency meter, will help you do a better job of leveling out your consumption and avoiding the use of energy intensive appliances during peak hours of the day.

You should also notice that each meter on the dashboard has a little blue question mark near it. You can click on any of those little question mark links to get more information about each item represented on the dashboard. Further questions? Just give us a call!

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!

A Little Foundation Information

That’s right. Fiber is indeed good for you! We’re not talking about Metamucil here. We are talking about the kind of fiber that is coming to your home or business right here in Glasgow!

You have probably noticed all of the trucks with the bright EPB red, blue, and green logo on them working feverishly around Glasgow. What is coming? The future! And it is coming to Glasgow before almost anywhere else in the United States. We are rebuilding our broadband network with a new architecture called Fiber To The Home (FTTH).

In the United States there are about 120 million homes. Fewer than 1% of those homes are connected to a FTTH network. Does that make you feel special? It should. FTTH means that all of the telephone, internet, cable television, and electric metering signals coming to and from your home will be carried on a light wave traveling down a strand of glass smaller than a human hair. The FTTH architecture requires far less maintenance, experiences fewer outages, and is much more robust than the coaxial cable network which serves your home today. FTTH will allow us to offer many new and exciting services, including internet access at speeds many times faster than the very fast service you already enjoy.

Glasgow is famous for leading the United States in the implementation of advanced broadband networks. We started this race in 1988 and our lead has yet to be challenged. Glasgow’s FTTH project continues that trend. Glasgow is the only city in Kentucky installing a FTTH network. The first 600 home project is taking place right now. These are the homes closest to our Jama M Young Technology Center that houses the FTTH hardware. After this area is completed, we hope to continue this network conversion for the next few years until every home and business in Glasgow is connected to the future.

Yes, Fiber Is Good For You. We hope you return to this site often so we can keep you posted on the cool new products we are inventing right here in Glasgow! This is a very exciting time to live in Glasgow and be a part of this latest iteration of innovation by the EPB. We hope you will join us in this effort to keep bringing Glasgow the future, faster!