Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 24, 1994 TAG: 9502160034
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: FROM STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
DATELINE: FRANKFORT, KY. LENGTH: Medium
A contract worth as much as $90 million over the next decade was awarded Thursday for development of a communications network that would link all 120 Kentucky counties.
Winners were Local Exchange Carrier Telephone Group, a partnership of Kentucky's 20 local telephone exchange companies, and LCI International, a Virginia-based company with a fiber-optic network for voice, data and video transmission.
Gov. Brereton Jones said the group would create an ``information infrastructure for both public and private use.'' It will be a vast network with a fiber-optic ``backbone'' and at least one access point in each county, Jones and other officials said.
Every county would eventually be equipped to compete for medium- and high-tech businesses, Jones said in a news conference.
Kentucky is not the only state competing for such businesses. In neighboring Virginia, the Roanoke and New River valleys are touting their significant concentration of technology-based businesses in areas such as fiber optics, wireless communications and bio-technology.
Roughly a dozen fiber-optics businesses are located around the region, giving the Roanoke and New River area one of the highest concentrations of fiber optics in the nation.
The businesses are drawn to the area or have sprouted here largely because of Virginia Tech's expertise and research in these areas.
Virginia Tech has also joined with Blacksburg and Bell Atlantic in "wiring" the town and university together in one of the nation's first electronic villages interconnected by computer.
In Kentucky, state officials say the ``information highway'' would allow schools to offer more classes and companies to train more workers through interactive television, Jones said. Delivery of health care could be improved, and anyone in Kentucky could have access to virtually unlimited information sources, he said.
``I do not believe it is possible for me to overstate the significance of this project,'' Jones said. ``We will look back on this ... as being the beginning of real equality for all 120 counties.''
The project does not entail vast construction, nor is the state trying to build a system itself, Jones said. The idea was to ``harness existing systems within state government and the university system so that we could utilize our collective purchasing power for the private construction and operation of the network,'' he said.
The potential value of the contract is the amount state government would expect to spend for information services, anyway, Jones said. But the contract will cut state government's data transmission costs in half - $1.1 million - in the first year, he said.
Doyle Friskney, director of communication and network systems for the University of Kentucky, said the new network could be operating in several months.
Telephone companies will have to install a lot of digital equipment in their central offices, but the infrastructure will consist of fiber optics already in place, Friskney said.
``We'll interlink all that, and we'll begin building networks and networks. A lot of this work has been done because [phone companies] have to do that to modernize,'' he said.
The smaller networks will be tied together with a telecommunications carrier
``What they're really going to do is tie this together with a carrier to interlink with a large backbone, and they're going to be able to deploy quickly with a large information highway.''
Harry Ruth, chief executive officer of the Greater Paducah Economic Development Council, said the network would coincide nicely with his city's strategy for economic development.
The Paducah Information Age Park opened this year, catering to companies that manage and manipulate information.
``The more we can bring on line and the more attention the state can get as a telecommunication state, the more it adds to our value,'' Ruth said in a telephone interview.
``It also links us through telecommunications to other parts of the state that we've never had the ability to link to,'' Ruth said.
``We fully expect one day to sit with a client in our conference center and have a conversation with the governor and nobody leaves their office.''
by CNB