GLASGOW — Early Christmas shoppers were out in the usual large numbers this holiday weekend trying to find the best bargains in apparel, housewares and electronics — especially electronics. Many of those latest gadgets and gizmos, whether they be televisions, computers, hand-held communication devices, DVD players or interactive gaming modules, will need a lot more of something this year and that’s high-speed connectivity.

While local residents may have been planning their Christmas lists and thinking about where to find the best sales on Black Friday, one local utility was taking steps to make sure all those electronic presents that will be found under countless trees on Christmas morning will have enough bandwidth to connect them to the Internet faster when people start logging on to try out the new hardware, programs, apps and games.

Board members of the Glasgow Electric Plant Board voted unanimously Tuesday night to spend almost $70,000 on new equipment to further upgrade that utility’s capabilities and increase the speed and ease at which customers can surf the Worldwide Web.

The members gave EPB Superintendent Billy Ray approval Tuesday during a regular board meeting to purchase a Motorola TX32 core card to add to the current Motorola Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) the utility uses for its Internet service. At a cost of $68,800, the card’s implementation will allow another general speed increase to all EPB customers, according to Ray.

“In my opinion and in my staff’s opinion, once again we need to plan another fairly significant upgrade of the hardware that makes our Internet service work,” he told board members. “EPB staff has determined that the next most effective step in upgrading net bandwidth to the home is to add (the card).”

The 8-1/2 by 11-inch card, comprised of approximately 10,000 components, is the next step in the implementation of a five-year plan of upgrades proposed by staff members, Ray said.

The explosion of online interactive games during the past few years is one of the main reasons for the increasing need for Internet providers to add more bandwidth.

“Gaming is such a huge consumer of bandwidth now because it used to be something that happened between a user, a processor and a TV set. The gaming business, if you played Atari in the past, this isn’t it. Now, (it) is perhaps hundreds of people playing the same game against each other in all different parts of the world and consuming bandwidth not only for the game, but they talk to each other and sometimes they have voice, video, all this stuff going on. It is a huge change in what we’re asked to deliver,” Ray said.

One of the most popular games, “World of Warcraft,” a massive, multiplayer online role-playing game with more than 12 million subscribers, according to Wikipedia, will have a new version released on Dec. 7 by the company that makes it, Blizzard Entertainment.

Another expanding online market is video on demand services to individual residents. One such provider, HULU, allows subscribers to order movies delivered through the Internet for a minimal monthly fee.

“It represents the future, we believe, of how TV will be delivered,” Ray said. “HULU Plus is something you can now buy for like $7.99 a month where you have access to an unbelieveable library of video that is delivered to the home ... and (HULU) just now upgraded to do more of a cable TV model.”

Going forward, computers and televisions will become more and more interchangeable in their capabilities of allowing people to use them to connect to multiple Internet services. Ray pointed out to board members that the technology he uses in the boardroom for meetings, which integrates PowerPoint presentations, links to Internet sites, etc., will be commonplace in homes in the future.

“Nearly all the TVs people will be buying going forward do have Internet access and do have a browser on them,” he said. “Right now, you have to be fairly technology savvy because it’s easy to deliver this to your computer screen, a little bit more difficult to run your wire, hook up to your TV set and watch it on your TV, but that has become more simple every day.”

New SONY, Google and Apple televisions on sale now will allow consumers to set up these integrated services in their homes as long as there is enough bandwidth available.

“You can do this in your living room as long as you have a big slug of bandwidth being delivered to you from somebody like the Glasgow Electric Plant Board,” Ray said. “This is going to be a real challenge to us — to our people. We’re not going to be selling basic cable to people for many more years, it’s going to be looking like this.”

Many of the networks are also trying to figure out how to deliver video the same way through their own Websites, according to Ray. And that adds to the need for bandwidth, as well.

“If you missed (CBS) “60 Minutes” Sunday night don’t worry about it. You can click on it and watch it online — the whole episode. Just maybe three months ago they put little snippets of episodes out there. Now, this is the whole hour,” he said.

According to a recent Associated Press story, Netflix, a major player in providing movie rentals to homes, has changed its business plan to begin phasing out mail delivery of DVDs to subscribers and will concentrate efforts toward the cheaper method of offering movies exclusively through online streaming via the Internet. This, of course, will also add to the demand for additional bandwidth from local providers such as EPB.

“They’re basically deciding to move from their business model where they would mail a DVD, now through IP over the Internet. They’re going to make more money that way because they don’t have to deal with mailing or postage, but companies like us have to figure out how to make their business work for them,” Ray said. “We don’t get any revenue out of it. They get all the revenue, but we have local customers, local owners, who will raise Cain if their new Netflix movies lag or are not delivered as quickly as they would like for them to be delivered.”

EPB will continue to provide the most up-to-date Internet service possible in spite of the increasing pressure to spend money to provide the additional bandwidth to meet growing demand, according to Ray.

“So all of those factors fit into our recognition that Internet bandwidth is spiraling upward and perhaps the center of the success of the Glasgow Electric Plant Board is going to be in maintaining our dominance of the local Internet service market,” he said. “Everybody that we’re competing with is richer and bigger than we are. But we do have this really great dominant market share of Internet access in our community and we think the only way to maintain it is to always make it better even before people ask for it to be better.”

The new Motorola card should be in place before Dec. 25, but there will be no additional charge to customers for the upgraded, faster Internet access.

“We’re going to have to keep our Internet product the most desired product in the community. ... (The card) will allow us around Christmas to up our speed again. It has become a tradition to charge the same, but deliver faster speeds at Christmas every year,” Ray said.

Board member Linda Wells asked Ray about everything that was required to get the card in place and the system upgraded in time for the holiday.

“It’s not just a matter of sliding it in (to the CMTS). We’ve got to reorganize our nodes again and reassign IP addresses. The sliding it in is not the hard part. It’s the redesigning the architecture to accept it, but this will continue the process that we’ve been embarking upon to reduce the number of people who share bandwidth – what we call a node,” Ray told her.

Two years ago the average node had about 700 homes in it. The utility is now down to 250 customers per node and the new upgrade will allow EPB to continue to decrease that number.

The board approved additional upgrades just a few months ago following Ray’s recommendation.

“Because of the cards you all authorized us to buy just about three months ago, we were able to make some pretty dramatic improvements. We thought the next step was going to have to be to go out in the field and actually physically build more cable plant, redesign the architecture in a lot of neighborhoods, but now they’ve decided that it would be a lot cheaper, faster and more effective to just upgrade this card and leave the plant in the field alone,” he said.

Ray explained no new capital investment would need to be laid out for the card upgrade.

“This is really not new money. When we acquired capital for our improvements we were projecting for the next two years about six months ago. Part of those improvements was changing the architecture in the neighborhoods of some of the broadband plant. So, that will not have to be done at this time. Instead, we’re going to take roughly the same amount of money and spend it on this card to get – we think – more bang for the buck. This is not new capital we need to raise. This will be spending some of the capital we’ve already raised. We’re just spending it differently than we had projected when we raised it,” he said.