Daily Archives: January 28, 2008

Vermont Fiber Network for Rural Areas

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Thanks to David Russell for passing on a recent article from the Burlington Free Press (Rural towns bundling a blueprint for broadband). It tracks the process of East Central Vermont Community Fiber Network, a group of 22 rural communities in Vermont and their goal to get fiber.

To take a step back – Tim Nulty, is the chief consultant to the East Central Vermont Group. He spoke at the Blandin Broadband conference about his success developing and deploying broadband in Burlington Vermont. He recently left Burlington Telecom and is using some of the same strategies with the East Central Group.

According to the article the Group has “an agreement between towns; an agreement to design, build and operate the network; and a capital financing lease.” They presented to the board meeting of the Vermont Telecommunications Authority last week. The presenters made no funding requests but asked the state board for support with credit and regulatory hurdles.

Clearfield: fiber provider in Minnesota

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Sorry to be posting so much today. I was sick over the weekend and I want to get caught up – especially with the Minnesota mentions of broadband, including the following company profile from a recent Star Tribune article (Clearfield: Newly wired for profit).

Minnesota-based Clearfield, is a new – well reborn – company that provides copper and fiber-optic equipment to rural phone companies. They used to be called APA and they used to make optical lenses and ultraviolet-light detectors.

Clearfield now serves companies such as Paul Bunyan Telephone Co., 3 Rivers Communication, Heart of Iowa Communications, Pioneer Telephone Cooperative and Rural Telephone.

Apparently the rural FTH market is $3 billion. So it’s good to see a Minnesota company jumping in and it’s good for rural Minnesota to have a local provider.

For any communities of telephone companies that are thinking about fiber Clearfield introduced an easy snap-in wire harnessing cassette technology called Clearview in October, which cut Clearfield’s wire packaging costs by 20 to 25 percent and has been well-received. They just unveiled a new and improved version this month. Here’s a brief blurb from that press release:

“The Clearview Cassette was designed to address the limitations and concerns our customers expressed to us regarding traditional solutions,” said Johnny Hill, vice president of product development and management for APA Cables & Networks. “Our customers asked for a product that would allow them to incrementally grow their networks, in both inside and outside plant environments, while optimizing and protecting signal performance.”

The E-Doctor is Coming

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e-doctorI have 3 kids. They get sick. Generally I could diagnose their ailments. For example one will get pink eye at least once a year. Often I have wished that I could just email the doctor with the symptoms and have them email back a prescription. This was particularly true last month when my daughter needed medication (I knew what kind) in Ireland from her doctor in Minnesota. (No go, we now have doctor in Ireland, where medicine isn’t really free.)

Sometimes I don’t know what they have and then I really wish I could email symptoms. In fact I would email a heck of a lot quicker than visit. Visiting the doctor is inconvenient, kids never get sick during regular hours, and going to the office exposes them to more germs than licking the floor. Heck, if I could email symptoms, I might actually email my own symptoms rather than self medicating with Advil and riding it out.

So I was delighted to see that email health care may be on its way (in the Star tribune, Take two aspirin and e-mail me in the morning). Apparently Dr. Joseph Scherger has arrived from California to talk to Park Nicollet about email visits.

The article and Dr. Scherger say email visits are on their way. At this point, insurance apparently won’t pay full rate for email visits – although I think the time the patient saves makes up for that. Doctors say they miss the eye-to-eye contact. But as the article points out – half the time the doctors don’t have time for that anyways.

I have talked to several doctors that I know about this over the years. At least one mentioned that in this litigious age, there is always a worry of misdiagnosis and malpractice suits, which I understand but I kind of feel like some help is better than none and with email a lot of us would actually communicate more often than we currently do. So I remain cautiously optimistic – and keep my fingers crossed.