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Cascadeo Corporation focuses on assisting rural and metro telecommunications carriers throughout the country to architect next generation networks. We design, implement, and operate a wide range of systems and broadband access solutions. In writing this newsletter, our aim is to ensure we are providing recent updates on the rural broadband stimulus package, as well as strategic information that will provide our readers with industry insight, new trends, and exciting projects taking place around the country.
As we are sure most of you have heard, the RUS and NTIA will begin taking applications for the first round of funding on July 14th, 2009 at 8 AM EST. This is an extremely limited window, as the deadline for applications closes one month later on August 14th at 5:00 PM EST.
That means as of today, you have 39 days to submit completed applications before the first round of funding is closed. Clearly, NOW is the time to act. You can view the entire release from the RUS and NTIA here. As part of the newsletter, it is our desire to assist rural carriers take advantage of this opportunity.
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Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA)
The time is NOW!
After reviewing this first Notice of Funds Availability (NOFA), we have
targeted the following items as critical pieces of this legislation:
- Approximately $4 billion out of the $7.2 billion of program level
funding has been allocated in this round by the RUS and NTIA. The
remaining funds will be made available under subsequent NOFAs.
- The RUS has established the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), which
may extend loans, grants, and loan/grant combinations to facilitate
broadband deployment in rural areas. Of the $2.7 billion available to the RUS, up to $1.2
billion is available for last mile projects,
and up to $800 million is available for middle mile projects.
- The NTIA has established the Broadband
Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) which makes available grants
for deploying broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas in the United States,
enhancing broadband capacity at public computer centers, and promoting
sustainable broadband adoption projects.
- Both the RUS and
the NTIA have developed a two-step application process. In step one,
the goal is to create a pool of viable and potentially fundable
applications. Step two is to fully validate the submissions in step
one and identify the most highly qualified applications for funding.
- Grant applicants must provide documentation that the project would not
have been implemented during the grant period without federal grant
assistance.
We have posted summary articles from both the RUS and NTIA on our blog!
With $4 billion dollars available for the taking
in the next 12 days, now is the time to take advantage of this once in a
generation opportunity!
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Major Regional Exchange Expansion
Shovel-ready benefit for rural communities
In partnership with the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, Cascadeo is working to extend a metro area, open exchange point to rural areas of Washington State. This is a model we are planning to replicate in communities across the country as a part of the RBBS.
The region in question is a classic example of an under-served market, with limited-to-no coverage by the major phone and cable providers. DSL, dial-up, T1s, and copper-based technologies are the prevailing choice for businesses, schools, hospitals, etc. In the limited places where it is even available, the cost of high-bandwidth Internet access is several magnitudes more than in typical metro markets.
Approximately 50 miles south of this area, the Seattle Internet eXchange (SIX) is one of the largest free exchange points in the world. The SIX allows businesses, service providers, and public institutions to peer directly with content providers such as Microsoft, Google, Akamai, Youtube, and others, bypassing paid transit providers entirely. The SIX provides GigE (1000 Mbps) and TenGigE (10000 Mbps) connections and is a free, non-profit cooperative effort.
To bring the SIX north, the Northwest Internet Exchange (IX-NWWA) was created as a joint effort, with involvement by the Tulalip Tribes, Blackrock Cable, and Cascadeo Corporation. The IX-NWWA is designed to link hospitals, schools, Government institutions, data centers, telcos, and other Native-American tribes with the bandwidth intensive content providers located at the SIX. Operating as a not-for-profit extension of the SIX, the NWWA is bringing gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps and beyond) Internet access to rural communities in Northwest Washington state for the first time.
While we expect the IX-NWWA to be eligible to stimulus dollars, the project took less than two months to complete, and became operational at minimal cost and without any federal funding. The NWWA has been fully operational for a month now, and is in the process of bringing on new peers.
High-impact, cooperatively-managed, shovel-ready projects like these are what the NTIA and RUS are looking for in grant and loan applications. If you are interested in learning more about this
project or what similar projects could mean to your community, please contact us.
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Zenoss Network Management
The Single Pane of Glass you've been looking for
 As many of you with operational experience can well imagine, one of the areas we've found many clients struggle most with is network management. Older-generation monitoring and management systems are buggy, noisy, and often poorly maintained. After working with nearly every NMS on the market, we've become big fans of Zenoss, an open source NMS solution.
Zenoss is an enterprise NMS used by companies large and small. Rackspace, a major hosting provider, monitors over 13,000 devices with the system. LinkedIn, a very popular web property, uses Zenoss, as do dozens of other large companies. Cascadeo has done Zenoss deployments for CLECs, ISPs, mission-critical corporate networks, and datacenters. We are experts at designing and implementing the elusive "single pane of glass" NMS that everyone wants but few achieve.
Why Zenoss? Our reasoning is simple: It just rocks. Zenoss does the best job we've seen at aggregating data from many sources -- networking equipment, alarm & environmental systems, servers, virtualization hypervisors, even legacy phone switches -- and and then doing something useful with that data. It takes syslog data, catches SNMP traps, polls SNMP-capable equipment, supports hundreds of Nagios plug-ins, and even auto-discovers new elements. You train Zenoss what is important, and what isn't, making it even more useful over time. It even does a Google Maps overlay of your network automatically. In short, it's as close to the perfect NMS as we've ever found. The huge open source community support behind the product ensures that it will have a long, useful life, as well.
Why not? From our point of view, there are two disadvantages to Zenoss. First, the application is I/O intensive, which means that the hardware requirements for it are higher than some people might be expecting. Disk write speed is particularly critical for larger scale Zenoss installations. Second, we have seen a few cases where SNMP MIBs don't cleanly load into Zenoss and require some massaging. This is generally more of an annoyance than anything significant, but bears mentioning, especially if your MIBs are ancient or unusual.
Overall, Cascadeo believes that Zenoss is a best overall network & server management tool for the majority of organizations we work with, and can help with design, strategy, implementation, and operation of this application. Please contact us if you'd like an in-person demonstration or complimentary consultation to discuss ways Cascadeo and Zenoss can help your business.
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Cascadeo Rural Broadband Webcast
State of the Union in Broadband Stimulus
Through our partnership with the NTCA, we recently hosted a webcast for independent ISPs and rural phone carriers across the US. The webcast covered topics such as backhaul and last mile technologies, two case studies of a rural phone company and Native-American community deploying next generation projects, as well as future trends for the industry now that the broadband stimulus package has been announced.
If you would like to view our presentation, please click here, and choose 'webinar.'
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We are here to help!
Complimentary 2 hour consultation to our newsletter subscribers!
Now that the first round of funding is available we are offering a complimentary 2 hour consultation for our newsletter participants. We've now hosted a number of these meetings, and we've had some great results thus far!
We've covered a wide-range of topics for these organizations and in every case we've been able to provide the company with some industry insight, projects to consider working on, as well as introductions to networking sources or potential customers. If you're interested in learning more about the consultation, please let us know and we'll be happy to provide a bit more information about how this works.
Thanks,
The Cascadeo Team
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Cascadeo Corporation
1-866-9NET-OPS x105
http://www.cascadeo.com
info@cascadeo.com
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