Jackson Energy Authority today announced connection of its 10,000th fiber-to-the-home customer, as part of the FTTH Conference, opening today in Las Vegas.

The multi-utility authority began construction of its network in January 2004, working with Wave7 Optics gear, and has been aggressively adding to its network ever since, in the city of Jackson and surrounding Madison county. After reaching its first 10,000 customers within 16 months, the company expects to pass more than 35,000 homes in the greater Jackson area sometime in 2007.

Jackson Energy is a publicly owned utility which originally provided electric, natural gas, water and waste-water service to Madison County, Tenn.

“Getting into telecom was largely driven by our customers over the last 15 years or so,” said Kim Kersey, executive vice president of telecommunications for JEA. “Our customers were asking us to get into, initially the cable business, and now the telephone and Internet. That shows there is a lot of trust that our customers have for the job that we do.”

JEA is taking a hybrid approach to offering service. While it delivers video services, including digital cable TV programming and HDTV, it takes an open network approach on the voice and Internet side, serving as a wholesale network for local CLEC Aeneas Internet and Telephone and, since last April, for Cinergy Communications, an Indiana-based service provider offering service in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee.

“The thought we had was to maximize the options for customers,” Kersey said. “We always look for providers we think can deliver the same level of customer service that we provide.”

JEA offers a one-stop shop, providing sales, billing and customer service for its retail providers, and Cinergy is using those services, while Aeneas is not.

JEA business customers can get Internet services at speeds ranging from 784 kb/s downstream to 10 Mb/s. Consumer services range from 256 kb/s to 6 Mb/s.

“We’ve got quite a bit of bandwidth to work with so as applications require additional bandwidth needs, we can easily ramp up,” Kersey said. “The Wave 7 equipment we operate can easily go to 40 Mb/s per customer.”

To date, JEA has a 30% penetration rate for cable service and about 42% of those customers are also taking telephony.

“We think that will go up now that we have added a second provider,” he said. “We are pleased with those take rates.”