TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) - Tupelo Water and Light has been working on a program designed to boost its capabilities and to reduce the cost to the consumer.
Crews have been installing a fiber optic cable. Approximately 75 percent of it is in place around the city.
"We put in enough capacity on this fiber cable for the school systems and other departments of the city to be able to hook in to the Internet system here at City Hall in downtown Tupelo," said Johnny Timmons, director of Tupelo Water and Light.
With the cable, utility workers can assess any damage and read meters from their main office instead of going out to homes.
"And the good thing is the equipment that we are putting in, we will be able to take a reading on you 24 hours a day," added Timmons.
"It'll all be read on the same day," added Dwayne Daniel, an electrical foreman. "Your meter will have the same amount of days on your bill instead of some having more and some having less."
The next phase of the project after the fiber cable is installed is the bidding process on automated meters for both power and water.
"One of these days, TVA in the near future will be coming out of what we call time-of-use electric rates," said Timmons. "That's what has pushed us toward this because we have to have the technical metering to be able to read these meters on time-of-use basis."
Plans call for the meters to go into place sometime during 2013.
