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SERVICE PROVIDER STRATEGIES
Q&A With Will Helmly, Home Telecom Home Telecom’s fiber-to-the-premises network is a key factor in the economic growth of the Charleston, S.C., region.
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ome Telecom was one of the first companies in the southeastern United States to deploy a fiber-to-the-home network, and in 2012 it was one of several FTTH deployers honored with a Calix Innovation Award for using fiber to drive local economic development. (A video Calix made about the company can be viewed at www.calix.com/video/innovation/2012_ innovation_award_home.html.) Recently, Broadband Communities had the opportunity to chat by phone and email with Will Helmly, president of Home Telecom, about the company’s 100 years of history in the Charleston region. Broadband Communities: Could you give our readers a bit of background about Home Telecom? Will Helmly: Home Telecom is an independent telecommunications company headquartered in Moncks Corner, S.C. High-quality, reliable services have kept Home Telecom in business since 1904, from a humble beginning with six telephones installed in buildings around Moncks Corner as a community service. In 1916, the company was sold to the local electric company; after being bought back by Mary Winter in 1939, it was renamed Home Telephone Company. In 1947, Mary Winter sold the company to her daughter and son-in-law, Thelma and Shellie Helmly. Their sons, Robert and Dozier Helmly, began managing the company in 1962. In 2004, I took over the reins of president and COO from my father, Robert Helmly, but he continues as CEO and vice chair of the company. In 2011, Home Telephone began doing business as Home Telecom to effectively communicate the value our company provides to our customers.
connected by providing high-speed internet access to 98.5 percent of the service area. Funding these Wi-Fi areas is proof of this commitment. Home Telecom prides itself on being the “easy-to-do-business-with company” and provides first-class, local, 24/7/365 customer support with four local offices, multiple local call centers and local technicians.
Will Helmly
Currently, close to 200 telecommunications professionals serve more than 20,000 residential and business customers in a large portion of the South Carolina Lowcountry – an area of approximately 905 square miles, almost the size of Rhode Island – using copper, coax and, most notably, fiber to the home. Recently, Home Telecom Wi-Fi was launched as an amenity in a few of our local communities’ parks and downtown areas. Home Telecom is committed to doing its part to keep America
Learn more at the Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas about how broadband changes lives in rural areas.
BBC: How did you get started with fiber to the home? WH: With the 2004 acquisition of Daniel Island Media, Home Telecom became one of the first telecom companies in the Southeast to deploy a commercially viable FTTH network. We have shifted away from deploying DSL and HFC in new subdivisions and now deploy FTTH only. Over the past few years, we have also been overbuilding our existing copper plant with fiber. Today, we serve more than 35 percent of our customers with FTTH, with approximately 700 new installs annually. We have more than 30 Velocity FTTH Communities, including greenfield neighborhoods, brownfield overbuilds and multipledwelling-unit properties across varied demographics. We provide FTTH to multimillion-dollar homes on Daniel Island and to some of the most rural portions of our service area. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,
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SERVICE PROVIDER STRATEGIES A dedicated home integration team works closely with home builders and buyers in our area. Home Telecom was the recipient of a broadband stimulus grant. Our project, the Lowcountry Broadband Project, will bring FTTH to more than 1,000 homes in a very rural area of Berkeley County, S.C.
Club meeting just recently, someone told me he was getting ready to move and would be looking for a home in our FTTH territory. He needed that reliability and bandwidth because he wanted to be able to work from home.
BBC: How do you work with developers to promote the benefits of fiber to the home? WH: We pride ourselves in forming partnerships with area developers. We have specialized employees, from a business development manager to an FTTH product coordinator and a residential door-to-door salesperson, who form business partnerships with developers, home builders and real estate agents to ensure we get to the home buyers first. In regard to marketing, we have a dedicated home integration team that works closely with home builders and buyers in our FTTH areas. They even meet with home buyers to plan and install their connected lifestyle choices. We are extremely pleased with the success of our home integration offering. We custom design Bose home theater systems combined with Samsung TVs and distributed audio solutions where music can be played throughout a home, as well as on decks and in pool areas. These services bring the connected lifestyle experience to life for homeowners in our Velocity areas, allowing them to Live Life Ahead! Even with the growth in this area, we weren’t immune to the economic downturn, so every developer is looking for ways to differentiate. Being able to promote a neighborhood as an FTTH neighborhood helps developers compete in a pretty competitive real estate market. There is absolutely a segment of the market that is looking for bandwidth and reliability. At a Rotary
BBC: Have you had any unique requests from developers? WH: We have brought fiber to some unusual places. A few years back, we had a development of large, estatetype lots, and one of the first things the developer needed was to put in a sewage pumping station and to alarm it. We had made a commitment to do fiber to the prem in this neighborhood, so now we like to brag that we’re one of the first companies to do fiber to the septic tank. The development used the fiber connections to check the levels in the tank and send alarms if the pumps weren’t cutting on in time and it got too full.
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BBC: How do you reach out to business customers? WH: Our Velocity businesses are supported by dedicated sales representatives and a sales engineer who work directly with businesses of all sizes to assist them in finding the perfect solutions to meet their voice, data, TV and security needs. Whether it is Metro Ethernet, Hosted PBX with Unified Messaging, or Total Connect for connectivity to security systems and cameras by way of smartphones or tablets, our dedicated Velocity Business team will find the perfect solution. BBC: Does the availability of fiber help in bringing new businesses to the area? WH: It certainly helps the economic development folks promote this area and differentiate it from all the other economic development units out there. Just recently, for example, a
large software developer was looking for a new site. It needed some bandwidth right away, and it was planning to roll out a new cloud-based product, so it knew it would have to upgrade quickly but had no idea how much bandwidth it would eventually need. When this company found that we had fiber readily available and that we could deploy it in days and upgrade on the fly – well, that certainly helped secure them. We’ve been able to meet the company’s demands thus far. We expect those demands to grow exponentially as the company pushes the product out further, but we can go up into multiple gigabits per second without any trouble at all, and to go up from there will just mean replacing the electronics on the ends of the network. Another company – one that builds containers for cargo planes – didn’t actually pick our area because of bandwidth, but once it got here, it started contacting various providers. The first question was, “We need x amount of bandwidth; can you provide it?” I said we could provide that and more without any trouble, and the company was floored by that. The next question: “Can I get it in three weeks?” I said, “Sure, we can do it today.” This company needed bandwidth and needed it fast and was not used to getting the kind of response it got from us. So the fiber is a plus for all our businesses, and our health care facilities and schools also benefit from it. Our local school district is able to communicate with all its employees and schools via video streaming. Rural schools can benefit from distance learning with videoconferencing. Our fiber network has enabled remote satellite hospitals in our area to share patient data such as X-rays with radiologists in the main hospital; dental offices use the network to share and discuss patient data between locations. We were also involved in connecting Roper Hospital Berkeley, here in Moncks Corner, with fiber as part of the FCC’s Rural Health
| BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | January/February 2013
SERVICE PROVIDER STRATEGIES Care Pilot Program. Roper doesn’t have a staff psychiatrist, so the time to diagnose a psychiatric patient used to depend on the availability of an out-of-area psychiatrist. Now, telepsychiatry allows Roper Hospital Berkeley to call on psychiatrists located virtually anywhere at any time. The average stay was reduced from 36 hours to four hours. BBC: You mentioned Velocity several times. What is the advantage of using this brand name? WH: Special emphasis is placed on our FTTH offerings by giving the technology its own unique brand of Velocity. We have a dedicated section of our website, VelocitybyHome. com, and have developed exclusive Velocity bundles with special pricing available only in Velocity areas. In our Velocity residential markets, we offer our standard digital telephone; digital television with HD, DVR and video on demand;
high-speed Internet plans with a choice of asymmetric and symmetric speeds up to 110 Mbps; security equipment and monitoring with phone, cellular or Internet monitoring; and Total Connect, which provides standard and video monitoring with remote access to the customer’s system from a smartphone or tablet. BBC: What do you see as the market potential for services beyond the triple play? WH: Our home integration offerings are exclusively available in residential Velocity markets. We market a connected lifestyle with offerings such as structured wiring packages, home networking, home theater, and whole home audio. Security services are offered marketwide as an add-on to our various bundles. We have found that creative equipment and monitoring packaging and pricing with monthly promotions are key in this competitive market. Recently, we enhanced the
offering by providing monitoring over the Internet and Total Connect for remote access to the system and video monitoring solutions. Residents and businesses have embraced our security offerings. Over the past year, we’ve averaged 15 to 20 new security installs per month. The installation rate is steadily increasing as we introduce advancements such as the ability to watch live video feed or send video clips to smartphones. Our newest offering, which we are now preparing to launch, is home automation, which will enhance our security offering by providing advanced services such as thermostat and lighting control, door locks and more. We are having fun with the branding of our new line by using an acronym developed from our widely used slogan, Live Life Ahead. LiLA will come to life as the Home Telecom solution to help manage a home or business. v
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Phone: 617.274.8171
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