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Community Impact 6 telecom initiatives that have made a difference

"For small towns to survive, they must be given a level playing field"

Ask people in Osborne, Kansas; Booneville, Arkansas; or New Mexico’s Mescalero Indian Reservation about killer broadband applications and you’ll get a variety of answers that all boil down to the same thing-revitalizing the local community. From telemedicine to distance learning to generating new business opportunities, communities nationwide have experienced firsthand the benefits of modern telecommunications infrastructure.

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In the pages that follow, we profile six infrastructure initiatives and the people who made them happen. "The goal of a telecommunications project should be to invigorate the community by providing essential services or stimulating economic growth," writes Victor Glass, director of demand forecasting and rate development for the National Exchange Carriers’ Association, who served as a judge for the first America’s Network Community Impact awards program. Glass adds that an innovative coalition of buyers and sellers can often be important to the success of an economic development program focused on telecom.

A quick review of our honorees supports that view. Read on to learn how local telcos partnered with community leaders to obtain funding and make initiatives viable. Our congratulations to all parties involved for their efforts. We are delighted to have the opportunity to honor their achievements.

America’s Network would also like to thank Victor Glass and our other two judges-Shirley Bloomfield, vice president of government affairs and association services for the National Telephone Carrier’s Association and Nancy Kaplan, vice president, Adventis-for their participation in making our first Community Impact awards program a success.

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Kansas:

Bringing business opportunities to the heartland

Initiative: To bring high-speed connectivity to remote Osborne, Kansas

Economic benefits: Helped existing companies build and retain business and jobs, helped incubate new home-based businesses

Infrastructure: Community-wide fiber-to-the-premises

Service provider: Nex-Tech, the CLEC arm of Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.

Key parties: City of Osborne, local community leaders

Funding: Rural Utilities Service broadband loan

With a population of 1730 (and 90 miles away from the nearest larger town) Osborne, Kansas has a surprisingly high number of businesses-more than 100, according to Jeff Wick, chief operating officer of Nex-Tech, the competitive local exchange carrier arm of Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.

Nex-Tech’s Wick: "For small towns to survive, they must be given a level playing field"

Helping to support those businesses is a fiber-to-the-premises network that Nex-Tech completed in 2003. That network lets plastics molding company Osborne Industries transfer bulky CAD files to customers nationwide without the glitches that the company previously experienced. High-speed file transfer capability also helps cabinet-maker Tishlerei better serve its customers. And several home-based businesses are selling jewelry and other items over the Internet, often through home pages built using a template provided by Nex-Tech and hosted at no extra charge when people sign up for high-speed service.

"When you look at the small communities in our area, we see population declines that are astonishing," says Wick. "For small towns to survive, they must be given a level playing field. Our strategy is to offer building blocks to level that playing field."

Osborne is the third community in the area where Nex-Tech has done a complete overbuild of the incumbent telephone company’s network. "After we got the first one built, we got calls from other communities saying, ‘Can you look at bringing the same services to our community?’"

Several Osborne businesses rely heavily on Internet sales
Osborne was a prime candidate because Nex-Tech already delivered cable television to the town over a hybrid fiber coax network, which provided fiber connectivity to the outside world. The company did a feasibility study, which revealed that the project could be viable if 70% of potential customers signed up for service.

Nex-Tech had its first meeting with community leaders in the spring of 2001. Based on local leaders’ enthusiasm and commitment, Nex-Tech opened a sales office in Osborne (hiring Osborne residents to staff it) in the fall of 2001. By December, the company had reached the required 70% commitment level. Today’s take rate is 95%.

"We started construction in the spring of 2002," says Wick. "In the spring of 2003, we finished conversion and cutover."

Osborne mayor George Eakin believes the high-speed network already has helped retain jobs in the community. "For Osborne Industries and for a local chemical wholesaler and seed packaging plant, the high-speed network has meant that sales and engineering could stay here, rather than being farmed out elsewhere," says Eakin.

High-speed connectivity to the local hospital and local school is also benefiting the community by enabling distance learning and telemedicine applications.

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North Dakota:

The power of learning

Initiative: A distance learning network interconnecting five southwestern North Dakota school systems and Dickinson State University

Economic benefits: Educational opportunities for the connected communities

Infrastructure: ATM switches supporting MPEG2 video

Service provider: Consolidated Telcom

Key parties: Dickinson State University, five area high schools

Funding: USDA grants, e-rate universal service funding, resource donations and discounts from Consolidated Telecom

When three high schools in southwestern North Dakota got connected to Dickinson State University via an analog video system several years ago, word eventually spread to neighboring communities. By the year 2000, numerous small towns were asking Seth Arndorfer, who was then a communications specialist at Consolidated Telcom, if they could get connected. It seemed everyone loved the idea of being able to share teaching resources and to take college classes remotely without making the long drive to Dickinson.

"I had a personal interest in the project," says Arndorfer, who believed strongly in the benefits that higher learning could bring to the community.

Adding more schools to the existing system wasn’t a viable option. "The drawback to the old system was that it was like a light switch," says Arndorfer. "All three locations were always either on or off. It needed more flexibility."

Consolidated undertook a feasibility study and determined that the optimum solution would be an MPEG2 system working over an ATM network using switched virtual circuits to enable up to four locations to interconnect at a single time. That option was chosen because it offered both flexibility and excellent picture and sound quality. "The superintendents didn’t want a classroom setting that was worse than what they were used to," says Arndorfer.

The new system, however, required that existing locations upgrade equipment and connectivity, and that any new communities would also have to make such an investment. After numerous meetings with school districts throughout southwestern North Dakota, five school districts stepped up to participate in the network upgrade. Several qualified for e-rate universal service funding-and Dickinson State University donated the time of a grant writer, who helped the schools obtain grants of $10,000 each from the USDA’s Rural Economic Area Partnership program.

Consolidated Telcom donated consulting time and, says Arndorfer, "monthly service charges were discounted severely to where the schools could afford them." Consolidated also had to make an investment in its own network to support the project, which required an ATM switch in each community. Some communities already had such switches, but others had to be installed. The company was able to help justify the investment on the grounds that the new switches also could be used to support advanced digital subscriber line services.

Arndorfer is now employed by Dakota Carrier Network, which operates a fiber network that underlies a statewide distance learning network, dubbed SPICE, to which Dickinson State and the southwestern North Dakota schools are connected.

– Joan Engebretson

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Indiana:

Remote medical consultation

Initiative: Telemedicine link between hospital and rural health clinic

Economic benefits: Medical care for residents of outlying rural areas

Infrastructure: Fiber optic link connecting audio and video equipment located at the hospital and at the clinic

Service provider: Hancock Telecom

Other key parties involved: Hancock Memorial Hospital

Funding: Grant from Indiana State Department of Health, self-funded by Hancock Telecom

Some might say that Bobby Keen has been watching too many futuristic TV shows. Keen, the president and CEO of Hancock Memorial Hospital in Greenfield, Indiana, envisions a time when a doctor at a major medical center can perform a surgical procedure on a patient lying in one of his operating room-remotely, through computers, robotics and fiber optic link. "It’s going to be possible one of these days, very soon," Keen says. "We’ll have instantaneous access to some of the best physicians in the world."

For now, however, Keen is more than happy with the telemedicine system he has in place right now: sophisticated audio and video conferencing equipment and a fiber connection between Hancock Memorial and its health clinic in rural Knightstown, Indiana, 14 miles away. At one time, a patient who came into the Knightstown clinic would see a nurse, who would often end up on the phone to the hospital, trying to describe the symptoms or condition, but now that patient can be seen by doctors in Greenfield via the telemedicine link.

"A person can come into that clinic in Knightstown, and he might have a deep cut on his arm," Keen say. "The cameras can actually photograph real-time that wound, and then it’s blown up and sent over to a 20- or 25-inch screen in the ER of Hancock Memorial Hospital in Greenfield. Doctors can talk to the patient in real time, and they have said they can see skin wounds, look into people’s eyes, better over the telemedicine link better than with patients in the ER, because of the clarity of the picture."

The seeds for the Hancock telemedicine system were planted at the National Telephone Cooperative Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans in 2000. Keen had spent the last few years visiting other hospitals that had telemedicine systems, including one in Oklahoma that ran telemedicine applications over copper lines. "Someone would be speaking on one end of the system, and on the other end, you could see person, but the voice would not be synchronized," he says. "As we talked to the physicians and the users, healthcare users and patients, we realized that they didn’t feel comfortable using these applications because the technology wasn’t where it needed to be."

At the NTCA show, Keen met up with Michael Burrow, general counsel at Hancock Telecom, and discussed Keen’s interest in telemedicine. Hancock was in the process of installing a fiber ring in Greenfield and was interested in extending the network into more outlying regions, but could not justify the cost. Keen applied for, and received, a grant from the Indiana State Department of Health, which underwrote the cost of the audio and video equipment and a portion of the fiber build; Hancock Telecom bore the remainder of the construction costs, as well as all of the engineering and ongoing maintenance expenses.

Keen says the project could not have succeeded without Hancock Telecom’s enthusiasm and dedication. "It was an issue of me expressing a need to our local telephone company, and them coming back and saying, ‘We can help you with this need,’" he says. "There are people, particularly the elderly, who live in Knightstown and have no way of getting to Greenfield. Now they can go to a rural health clinic and still get access to proper care through this telemedicine hookup."

It’s a win-win situation for Hancock Telecom as well. The carrier’s CLEC subsidiary, Hancock Communications, had been doing fiber overbuilds in small towns adjacent to its service area, and the Hancock Memorial arrangement provided a way to further extend its fiber network. Hancock Telecom hopes to leverage the relationship further, working with the hospital to set up telemedicine links in three additional communities.

"Through this strategic partnership, our hope is that over the course of a few years, this small county hospital will have a fiber optic telemedicine to link multiple clinics," Burrow says. "People in small towns will have benefit of anything that’s going on in Greenfield, including access to doctors in Greenfield, without having to drive 30 minutes to get it."

-Shira Levine

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South Carolina:

Enhanced health care for a fast-growing community

Initiative: Establish next-generation network connectivity at two satellite hospitals

Economic benefits: Timely transfer of hospital files, additional patient services

Infrastructure: Gigabit Ethernet and ATM switches

Service provider: Horry Telephone Cooperative

Key parties: Grand Strand Regional Hospital, Georgetown Memorial Hospital

Funding: Horry spent $2.3 million for core network gear

Horry County, South Carolina is a place in transition. The county is home to 200,000 residents and happens to be geographically the largest county east of the Mississippi River. Swamps and farms consume the county’s western half. Resorts and golf courses in and around Myrtle Beach dominate the east.

Horry County is growing rapidly, driven by a significant increase in transplanting retirees. As a result, hospitals in Horry County have tried to keep pace with added health service demands.

Sharing medical images over Horry’s high-speed network
"One of the primary issues for these hospitals is how do they provide services to remote locations without duplicating equipment costs," says Brent Groome, chief executive of customer operations at Horry Telephone Cooperative, founded in 1954 and currently providing local exchange access, long-distance and Internet access.

Horry Telephone recognized that the county’s growth presented opportunities to improve telecom infrastructure. The issue that mattered most was timing. "That’s the biggest challenge – fitting the right technology in at the right time for the customer," says Groome.

Customers in this case are two of the area’s largest hospitals, Grand Strand Regional and Georgetown Memorial. Both had opened rural satellite health centers, and hospital leaders wanted to save on the cost of capital equipment by relying on the high-performance of data networks to relay critical files between sites. For instance, medical records and x-ray images could zip between sites, instead of depending on vehicular courier services. Horry Telephone, a non-profit cooperative owned entirely by customers of the telco, anticipated the demands of the new hospital locations and made its pitch at just the right time.

Groome points out that installing a new network triggers multiple risks. "If you deploy the technology too far ahead, suddenly you’re struggling with ROI. Anybody who is evolving their network in this manner has to do the legwork to support the technology."

After two and half years of installation, the new GigE/MPLS network was completed at a cost of $2.3 million in 2002. One of the unique benefits of the project was that eight area high schools also connected into the new network. Groome explains that school officials have aggressively promoted high capacity data capabilities to enable services such as distance learning. "They’re connected to South Carolina’s state education network, allowing them to do more creative things in the teaching arena," says Groome.

– Kirk Laughlin

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New Mexico:

Lighting up a nation

Initiative: Build a voice and data network for Mescalero Apache Tribal Nation, New Mexico

Economic benefits: New jobs, e-commerce, tele-medicine

Infrastructure: 75-route mile fiber ring, OC-48 capacity, TDM switches and DSL broadband.

Service provider: Mescalero Apache Telecom

Key parties: Former FCC Chairman William Kennard, USDA Rural Utilities Service, Siemens

Funding: $11.4 million loan package from RUS

Godfrey Enjady had the funding, had the equipment and had the manpower. But, when it came to digging trenches for a new fiber network on the 500,000-acre Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico, Enjady lacked one critical tool: reliable utility maps.

Enjady, the general manager and founder of Mescalero Apache Telecom Inc. (MATI), and engineers from Siemens Information and Communication Networks faced the unique challenge of charting the course of a new fiber ring partly around data gathered from their own GPS mapping. Enjady explains that water lines and other infrastructures were placed in the ground over the course of many years by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but the location of those facilities was not well documented. "People would come and go, but no one knew about the infrastructure," he says. "We had to figure out where the water lines were, and we discovered old wooden sewer lines where we didn’t expect."

The experience seemed to give Enjady one more reason to rock the Mascalero tribe out of its isolated slumber and into an age of imagination and hope. Enjady managed collection of the GPS findings, building a central database where details on in-ground systems are stored.

The Mascalero reservation stood for many years as a symbol of the abysmal level of communications services afforded American Indians. Before 1999 and the founding of MATI, only one in eight households had working telephones. There were only 10 PCs on the entire 4,000-person reservation.

"You had to get a ride somewhere if you needed to make a phone call," says Andrea Davis, a Siemens marketing director and manager of the company’s American-Indian program. "There was basically no such thing as ‘911.’"

Thanks to the spirit and courage of Enjady, who marshaled resources and recruited stakeholders to get behind the creation of MATI, over 92% of reservation households are now served with DSL broadband.

Enjady’s dream to "bring the most advanced services in the world to Mascalero" was realized over the course of a two and half-year period, marked in 2001 by the formal completion of the project. Enjady, a member of the Mescalero tribe, was well suited to promote the campaign primarily because of his background as a telecom technician, moving as a high school graduate from a repairman’s helper for Contel, a former local exchange operator in New Mexico, to working as an analyst at a NOC in Seattle by the mid-nineties.

One of the project’s earliest backers was Siemens, which provided a used central office switch to the reservation as a way to bring immediate improvement to the network, until the new network was in place. Another key advocate was former FCC Chairman William Kennard, whom Enjady personally lobbied to grant a waiver which allowed the tribe to access a $11.4 million loan from the USDA Rural Utilities Service (RUS) a year ahead of schedule.

One of the reasons the RUS granted the loan was because Mescalero Apache Telecom was certified as a regulated telco by the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission, according to Enjady. "Because we had that state status, we were able to get the funding at the federal level."

The arrival of ubiquitous telephony and broadband access has heralded major social and economic change for the reservation, which is also home to two Mescalero casinos. With higher network capacity has come the implementation of data monitoring systems and remote maintenance at the casinos.

Dozens of jobs have also been created at MATI. "We started with four people and now we have 32 jobs. We have our own long distance, our own ISP, and our own billing."

Enjady has also recruited retired industry veterans from carriers like the old USWest to come to the reservation and mentor tribe members eager to learn about telecommunications.

Davis says schools and hospitals on the reservation are also benefiting as more and more people become aware of the power of the new network.

Enjady believes that the skills and experiences developed at Mescalero can be transferred to other tribal nations in other parts of the country. "We are trying to outreach to other tribal nations to show them they can do this too," says Enjady. "A lot of them don’t have the money, but we want to show them that they can still find a solution."

– Kirk Laughlin

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Arkansas:

Persuading a company to relocate

Initiative: Enticed a relocating business to set up shop in the community

Economic benefits: 25 new jobs to start, with further expansion likely

Infrastructure: Wired an empty building with 11 business lines, 2 WATTS lines and a DSL connection

Service provider: CenturyTel

Other key parties involved: Booneville Chamber of Commerce

Funding: CenturyTel and GEX

Under normal circumstances, the addition of 25 jobs to a community would hardly be big news. For Booneville, Ark., however, it was cause for celebration. Booneville, which has 4200 residents and is located in Western Arkansas between the Ozark Mountains and the Oucachita Mountains, had recently lost one of its larger employers, a plastics manufacturer that had provided the community with about 300 jobs.

So when GEX, the nation’s largest rebuilder of premium engines and components for Volkswagen autos, expressed interest in relocating from southern California to Arkansas last October, Stacey McCullough, the executive director of the Booneville Development Corporation, jumped on the opportunity.

Broadband connectivity was a must for engine rebuilder GEX in choosing a new home for its operations.

"Like other small businesses in California, GEX had taken a beating over the last couple of years, and it was looking for a location where it would be less expensive to do business," McCullough says. "Arkansas is a natural fit for that-two years ago, the state did a survey in the southeast and found that Arkansas is one of the least expensive states to do business in."

The company narrowed its possible locations down to six cities in the state, presenting each one with a list of its needs-including the requirement that GEX be able to move into its new facility on Thanksgiving weekend and be up and running by Monday, November 25. The building under consideration in Booneville was empty, with just one drop and one telephone line serving it, but local incumbent CenturyTel assured McCullough that it could meet GEX’s needs within its time frame.

HONORABLE MENTION
GEX agreed to move to Booneville, and CenturyTel went to work, installing a total of 11 business lines, two WATS lines and a DSL line in just 20 days. "GEX does its business through 800 numbers or over the Internet," says Michael Ray, plant technician for CenturyTel’s operations in Arkansas. "If they couldn’t get that from us, they would have had to move somewhere else. We were able to provide them with all of their telecom requirements, and we’re happy they’ve come here."

One year later, GEX has added five more positions and plans to continue expanding. Meanwhile, McCullough hopes that the GEX success story will spur other companies to move their operations to Booneville. "Booneville is one of many communities that are doing the very same thing that we are doing," he says. "For a company like GEX to come in and say, ‘Everything this community told us is true, it has fulfilled every promise’-you cannot beat that kind of reputation."

– Shira Levine

http://www.americasnetwork.com/americasnetwork/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=76418

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