Data is a vital component of building a broadband network that will meet the needs of your community for years to come. Our team will help you create custom surveys to identify services based on availability, affordability, and reliability. We also facilitate public forums and interview key stakeholders and community institutions to learn about opportunities and barriers to access. Our comprehensive data gathering process will give you the demographic, economic, and technical information you need to chart the right course of action for your broadband network.
Assessing the current broadband and telecommunications in your community is an important early step in enhancing services. Our team will facilitate meetings with existing broadband providers, collect available data from existing service providers, map network assets, take pole inventory, and provide geographical mapping information related to funding. All assets will be layered in maps and provided to you in standard GIS formats.
We’ll assess your community’s residential and business needs — from community hospitals, exchanging medical records via high-speed data, to students researching homework assignments after school. We focus on working with towns, counties, and state governments to evaluate broadband needs, and identify working models, such as public-private partnerships and municipality owned networks. Our cost-modeling process will help you build a thorough budget for your community’s broadband network, including capital expenses, operating expenses, and return on investment.
Our team of engineers will build a high-level fiber optic broadband network to serve the community, complete with mapping of parcels, homes passed, and utility pole locations where data is available. We work hand-in-hand with stakeholders across your community to ensure the design meets and exceeds expectations of a broadband network, and appraise technical assets to ensure your network is future proof.
We understand the complexity of the Request for Proposal process. We start by working with your team to develop the RFP and manage questions and answers with prospective vendors. Our team is vendor and technology neutral. We solicit bids from vendors, evaluate vendor qualifications, and navigate complexities to help your community decide which solution best fits the project. Our team of experts reviews and rates each vendor proposal based on the approved vendor rating/selection criteria, while evaluating proposed technology solutions and performing a comparative analysis of all vendor costs.
Funding is often the biggest barrier to bringing broadband to rural and low-income communities across the country. Our team is skilled at leveraging all funding opportunities to provide creative funding solutions for your broadband project. We monitor federal, state, and local funding opportunities and can explain the complexities of securing funding. Our team’s professional grant writer has prepared and won numerous grants to fund broadband initiatives nationwide.
Contract negotiations can be challenging, but they don’t have to be. Our experienced team will walk you through contracting, answer questions along the way, and represent you in the negotiation process. From construction and installation to maintenance and operation—our proven review process will ensure a contract that meets your needs and doesn’t leave you asking, what did we sign?
You can rest easy knowing we are project managing the details involved in making your community’s broadband network a reality. Our vendor neutral team will lead the broadband and vendor relationship, managing constraints with time, scope, and budget to achieve all goals and milestones involved in constructing and installing your broadband network.
Maintaining a broadband network takes technical and logistical expertise. Our team works directly with vendors servicing and operating your network, and provides oversight on the administrative/operational aspects of their network. We also track industry trends and collaborate with your Network Administrator on overall broadband perspectives, including marketplace risks, competition, technology trends, subscriber price elements, open access functionality, upgrades, and network expansion.