Rock Hill Utilities is a municipally owned and operated utility in South Carolina which provides electric, water and sewer service. The Utility serves approximately 95,000 people, including residential and commercial customers within the City and its suburbs.

Q:        So what was the primary motivator for Rockhill in deploying a citywide wireless broadband network?
A:        We wanted to be a better utility and be able to offer our customers more choices. We wanted to be more responsible as a utility than the industry standard. To do that, we had to be able to get more information, manage it faster, and make it available where people could make conscious decisions about it.

We just went through a record drought for the last three years and we now have different rates that are more reflective of what our true costs are, and they're also reflective of a conservation mindset that says—we don’t want to waste water. We’ve tried to set conservation as a lifestyle so we're not encouraging consumers to water their lawn more than one or two days a week and the rates are structured to encourage that. And it's the same with electric. We want to start providing consumers with incentives or at least the opportunity to make more conscious decisions so we don’t have to build more power plants. We can use what we have and just manage it more wisely.

Q:        The smart meter program sounds like that was central into the decision-making process?
A:        It was. Basically, we wanted a system where the utility meters could report their condition automatically. So if we had power outages, the meters could report the outages themselves, without the users calling us and reporting their power was out. We also wanted to get real-time data off the meters, whether they were electric or water, and put that information in a database that would connect to our billing system. We could make that real-time information available for engineering purposes, for reporting, and do real-time analysis of transformer loading, and distribution automation.

But we also wanted to be able to make that information available to the consumer as well, so they could make decisions to change their behavior and their usage to take advantage of a better rate, and in some cases, look at conservation efforts. They could actually say, okay, if I turn my water heater off during this time of the day—they can look at their meter, and while they’re doing that see the benefits. Or maybe you want to set your thermostat from work. You log into our website, reprogram your thermostat if you're coming home earlier or later, and you can adjust the temperature accordingly. And the smart meters do all that. Now, obviously that's a lot of data and we needed to be able to pass that information back and forth in real time. So the wireless broadband network is one part of the system, along with fiber optics that gave us the ability to move that much data.

Q:        How have smart meters reduced power outage challenges?
A:        In the past, let's say we’d have a little storm which resulted in  several outages going on in different locations in a neighborhood with a couple hundred people. With smart meters, we have immediate notification and instead of waiting for 1,000 people to call me to tell me they just lost power—using only 48 lines coming in— I've got 1,000 meters that just reported they're out and I'm getting that information in a couple of minutes instead of a couple of hours.

In the past, we’d have to send a couple of trucks out, and they’d get the power back on. Then we’d call back the people who called us, even if it was 2:00 in the morning, and asked them, “did your power come back on?  If so press one, if not press two,” and send the crews back out. But out of a neighborhood of 500, we might have 50 customers who called, so that's 450 that we knew were out. When we would get the power back on to all 500, there were always two or three stragglers that didn't come on for some reason. They've had something that was just affecting them, not the whole neighborhood. And that’s something that happens in every outage and every neighborhood. But if all the meters are reporting in, before my truck leaves the neighborhood, I know if all the meters are working again. And if they are, then I can send the trucks on their way. If they're not all back online, I can say “wait a minute. Three of the meters are still not reporting, go check out these three before you leave.” Now we’ve saved the cost of moving those trucks, increased our customer satisfaction, and reduced outage time. The cost savings are coming from these kinds of situations.

Q:        What other applications are you using to help in managing power outages?
A:        I know where the outage is because I can pull that data into my GIS, our Geographic Information System, and see physically where all these people are located and the fact that it's probably a breaker out or a fuse at this location that's causing the outage. So, not only is the dispatcher looking at the call data saying Mrs. Smith’s meter is out of power on 123 Main Street, but I can look at the map and see her house highlighted, flashing, saying she's out of power. So you've got a digital representation of what's going on as well. And that is a big time saver when you can get that information instantly, be able to manage it, and move on.

Q:        How was the network funded and what how do you measure the value of it for the utility?
A:        Most of that was done through the smart meter project. We're reading our meters remotely instead of having somebody go out to look at them. If a consumer puts in a cut-off request, now we just read it remotely and create a bill at that time. If someone wants to take service out of his or her name and put it back in the apartment owner's name, we can do that remotely as well and this is very helpful since we get a lot of those requests everyday. Before, we had to send somebody out to read the meter to tell them their current bill. By being able to pull it up real time, we can tell them what their bill is right then. They pay us, we close out their account, or put it back in the property owner's name and everyone goes about their business. We save about $50 to $60 not having to send a truck and a person out to do something like that.

We showed how we were going to pay for a smart meter program that delivers real time data off the metering applications to the point where a consumer can see and use their own metering data to modify their usage and save money. It really cost-justified the whole program.

Q:        So tell me about some of the other applications running over the broadband network.  
A:        We have a lot of initiatives going; I'll start with public safety first, because that was a big one the city council wanted to hear about. We’re giving police officers access to all the SLED (South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division) databases. We’re able to pull mug shots down and they're able to get a plethora of other information in real time, that they just physically didn't have the ability to get in the past because of the bandwidth requirements of the data. We are pulling some video over the network as well—probably half of our police vehicles now have cameras in them and they are downloading video across the wireless.

The fire department is also using it. So currently if you call 911 or our fire department, with our en route communications, they go online and use
Wi-Fi to pull down the building footprint before they arrive, so they know exactly what they're going to face in terms of the building structure—types of materials, storage, and locations. So they've enjoyed that aspect of being able to get the data pretty fast while they're en route instead of having to wait for somebody to bring it to them or try to talk over the phone to somebody else. Now they have real data, so as our GIS department uploads data daily, they have real time access, and that's saving time too.

For the building and code inspection department, they're able to do inspections in the field—plumbing, electrical, and new building. Instead of having papers that come back to the office at the end of the day and get signed off—as soon as they get through the inspection, they get in the car, get the little tablet, write it up and boom, it's instant, it's in our server right then. So if the contractor calls in the next three minutes or gets online, he'll see whether or not his construction project was approved or disapproved and why, because it’s all online. It gives them real time ability to schedule where they need to go next, what they're doing in the field, and that's been a really good tool.

Most of our traffic signals are running across the fiber optic network. But because we have about 120 intersections that are on our fiber optics—in order to beef up the Wi-Fi, every place there's an intersection, we've made that a Tropos gateway, which means, probably a sixth of our network is a gateway, which is just absolutely incredible, so it's hot as a firecracker. And we have integrated all these networks together through the Wi-Fi, which has just given us truly ubiquitous coverage for anything that we need, whether in the office or out of the office.

I get calls everyday from people wanting to get on the Wi-Fi system, and unfortunately, we do not have it turned on everywhere. We have it available at City Hall, at most of our facilities and our parks—we have a lot of recreation parks—soccer parks, softball parks, and people love them because they hold these girl's softball tournaments where there might be 700-800 teams that come in for a week or so. The officials can get online to post information, look up new rules and regulations. The coaches love it because they can put scores in. The media loves it because they're going to have free access to get their articles and pictures posted. And parents love it because while they're watching their kids practice or play, they can have good access and do some work. So we get raving reviews on that.

Q:        Have you built any of your own custom applications?
A:        We had an application that we built with the Wi-Fi, GPS, and the Tropos unit on our sanitation trucks. Currently, we're picking up garbage cans on a regular basis, but our sanitation guys don't have a list of who pays and who doesn't pay. And we found that every month we were picking up about a thousand homes more than what we had collection orders on.

We wrote a small application using our GIS and the GPS and as our sanitation trucks go out, they see a little screen that shows them where they are based on the GPS coming from the Tropos, and it also pulls up all the houses along the route. So they click on the house and it automatically issues a work order, and the billing system initiates a bill for this location—they don't have to know any commands, they don't have to type anything, it’s just a touch screen, they just pick  and click. The system also gives us a report and tells us where they went today from a routing standpoint, it tells us how many garbage cans were emptied, and it fixes my billing system as we go. The fact that we've integrated it through the Tropos network, it's automatic. And all because the employee with a mobile unit is clicking a button.

Finally, we’re writing an application which will allow the police, the fire and other people to tell us where the potholes are, which streetlights that are out, or if there's a sign that's messed up or down—they can initiate an online work order. So if they see it, instead of taking time to call it in, the GPS tells us where they are, the Tropos network is recording the GPS location —they just click and say, there's a sign down, there's a light out, there's a pothole—and we can immediately create a work order and send a crew out based on that location.

Q:        Did you look at any alternative technology before you selected Tropos?
A:        We looked at alot of different systems. We started five or six years ago, but we didn't see a mature market that would deliver what we wanted. We pulled back and went out again about three or four years ago and scoped it again a little bit differently and looked at a lot of different vendors. Tropos was just the best fit for us and again, to do a municipal-wide application that would run all the different scenarios that we wanted, including GPS—I mean, we've got the GPS functionality running in all our mobile vehicles through the Tropos unit.

Q:        What kind of advice would you give to another city or a utility that might be considering deploying a wireless broadband network?
A:        Well, a lot of times you need the right people, because one person can't do it. It's simply a partnership. Our success was internal first. We had a city council that was very supportive and willing to let us go out on a limb, do something that nobody else was doing. Secondly, we had people who were committed. I think once we got the momentum going—we started showing some of the little benefits, then people come onboard and start coming up with ideas of their own and that's when it really takes off.

I would suggest if you're going to another city to look at what they're doing, or going to a conference, take people with you, let them buy into it up front so they become part owners. You've got to find out exactly what you want and what you'll find out is most people don't know what they want or even what’s possible. And it's not a one-size-fits-all—what we did in our city might not be the best thing for another city. I think it's definitely worth jumping into and seeing what you need. Take that first step, do it, try it out, see the benefits. And make sure you have the people who can help integrate it with your system; otherwise you’ll set yourself up for failure. But if you really want to see your city grow and have it be the next green, efficient city, go—if you want to do all the right things, then I think it's exactly the thing to do.

Q:        Thanks for your time, Jimmy.
A:        My pleasure, any time.