Connect > Adirondacks

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The challenge of providing last mile broadband in rural areas is simple - the economics do not support both capital and operating expenses. This is especially true for ‘wired’ infrastructure like coax or fiber optic cables, as the cost of labor and truck rolls continues to increase.

New and existing wireless technologies provide a toolkit for meeting this challenge, but are not a complete solution by themselves. Although deployment costs are significantly lower than ‘wired’ infrastructure, the capital expenses may not be recoverable in a reasonable period, discouraging or preventing private investment.

Our model is based on municipal ownership of the network infrastructure. It is as much about  the process as it is technology - a locally focused process with community collaboration.

Our mission is to guide and empower communities to create their own reliable and sustainable broadband networks, by sharing decades of experience in doing the same for private sector clients.

A while back I was helping a friend and neighbor research web-based construction management software. While home construction and project management are not my fields, I do have similar business challenges, so the research was educational for both of us.

During that process I came across the concept of a Work Breakdown Structure, a tool used in project management to define discrete work elements. The basic concept is to define planned outcomes, not planned actions. It sounds like simple semantics, until you actually try to think from two perspectives at once.

If you've ever planned or tracked a project with task or to-do lists, you've probably run into the same problems I have - too many tasks, undefined or overlapping tasks, and greater difficulty estimating time and costs. Using a WBS instead forces you to focus on results, leaving the implementation methods flexible.