Rural Telecom Congress

Link: Official web site

Special Attraction: Champion Awards (Best Practice)

When: October 5th – 8th, 2008

Content: Broadband – Local Gateway to Global Opportunity

The Rural Telecommunications Congress (RTC), in partnership with the Economic Development Council of Northern Vermont, will host the 12th annual Rural TeleCon Conference in Smuggler’s Notch, Vermont. The conference will showcase innovative approaches to building local capacity to improve the quality of life for people in rural communities.

Verizon and at&t were the winners of the FCC auction of the 700 MHz spectrum. Google missed out on any of the licenses but did release a response. The following is a summary of that release as reported in Information Week by Eric Zeman.

"Google did not come away from the FCC 700 MHz spectrum auction with any licenses. It did, however, force Verizon Wireless to spend $4.74 billion and trigger the open access provisions to a massive block of spectrum that covers most of the country. With those provisions, and Verizon's own 'Any Device' initiative, that leaves the door wide open for the Android platform.

Let sustainability begin (go to www.futurekansas.com for background information). It may have been too much for the FCC to figure out but the potential described below is what happens when building a network is driven by a business model versus the federal funding model.

Telecom bundling of information services and bandwidth has been a key component of successful deployment of aggregate services in the NHIN. AT&T, Tennessee and a third party interoperability vendor have formally announced the effort which shifts an awful lot of the responsibility to make content available to Tennessee's healthcare providers to AT&T's ability to offer a needed service at an affordable cost. To do so AT&T will be fronting the work of their third party HIE vendor, offering customer service, etc. much like they do now in their residential and business bundling tiers. While it could be pushed to identify a transaction level costing it sounds as if a monthly charge will be used between $3 and $100 to push/pull data from the exchange. Obviously a portion of those funds will be used by AT&T to insure the third party service is run correctly and sustainable, thus one of the most pressing problems facing NHIN on RHIO/HIE sustainability and business model is pushed to AT&T. AT&T has the funding base to take on the risk and the marketing/customer service infrastructure to make sure word gets out to potential customers. Healthcare providers get an affordable cost but more importantly get confidence that their exchange can be sustained with "real" dollars versus the come and go of federal/foundation funding.

Apparently Japan has begun the effort to deploy a satellite which can offer extremely fast Internet speeds. See the article from CNN entitled: Super-speed Internet satellite blasts off in Japan

They've announced the FCC Rural Health Pilot Projects and if you were at RuralTeleCon '06 you'll be a bit surprised. Money is way up and the projects that were funded really were no different than any other dedicated network project that could have been funded under the old Rural Health Mechanism. We did find out that rural healthcare providers will utilize the fund more if you give an 85% subsidy. $417 million approximately for very traditional uses. We'll have to assume that in the future that the Universal Service Fee will continue to fund 85% of these networks along with new networks.

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It has been some time since we've heard more about the FCC Rural Health Pilot Program that was announced and discussed by the FCC at Rural TeleCon '06 in Little Rock. This week Kevin Martin met with the American Health Information Community through Secretary Leavitt of HHS and announced his intentions for the program.

First he announced that he intends to ask other FCC commissioners to approve expanding the program to a grant program with $400 million for the next three years. That grant program would support broadband investments that connect to regional and national health information networks. There finally seems to be some evolving clarity at FCC and HHS that telecommunications is one of the most fundamental pieces of any plan to build a national network and as such it can be used as a driver, organizer of other activities. Again, the dollars for this effort come from the Universal Service fee funds which were again extremely under utilized at about 10% of the annual accumulation.

While Canada differs from the U.S. because of its national healthcare system, it does face many similar, significant challenges including paper based inefficiencies and getting information to the right place at the right time. Part of the solution is being proposed using the wireless network and a portion of the spectrum being reserved for healthcare information.

Global Life Article

Gates’s latest prophesies came on October 16 at Microsoft’s Unified Communications Launch 2007 event in San Francisco , where Microsoft revealed the full breadth of its products and plans for business telephony and unified communications.

If you want to know how significant Bill Gates thinks Microsoft’s unified communications platform is going to be, take a look at the lofty comparisons he made during his keynote on October 16:

- He compared the PBX to the mainframe, and unified communications to the PC.
- He compared the transition to software-based voice communications to the transition to computer-based word processing from the typewriter.

RURAL TELECON 07 IN SPRINGFIELD, IL

Community of Interest discussion sessions are important part of every Rural TeleCon conference. Here are the results from this year's discussion.

Infrastructure
Community/Economic Development
Policy
Health