Andrew Cohill, broadband expert and President of Design Nine,  announced that FastRoads LLC has selected Design Nine to manage the build out of the FastRoads fiber to the home project that is being funded by a U.S. Department of Commerce NTIA ARRA broadband stimulus award.  FastRoads LLC is owned by the nonprofit Monadnock Economic Development Corporation, and represents 43 towns in west and west-central New Hampshire.  The funding will make fiber to the business and fiber to the home available in Enfield and Rindge, New Hampshire and twenty other towns along a one hundred mile north-south route.  The FastRoads service territory covers about a quarter of the state. 

Design Nine developed the stimulus proposal submitted by FastRoads, and also designed the financial planning and network architecture needed for the grant proposal.  Cohill noted that his firm will manage the entire network build out, which will include equipment evaluation and selection, coordination of engineering and construction activities, testing of the network, installation of network management and monitoring software, and design of management and operations of the network. 

Design Nine’s high performance design will provide 100 megabit, Gigabit, and 10Gigabit fiber connections anywhere a FastRoads customer requests them.  The FastRoads vision is “Live anywhere, work anywhere,” which requires a network capable of delivering business class services anywhere in the entire region.

Andrew Cohill was quoted in Bandwidth boost in The Roanoke Times. A free copy of Andrew Cohill's white paper, Broadband For America: The Third Way, is available for download here.  

To learn more, you're invited to read the Design Nine blog, Design Nine Technology Futures, follow Design Nine on Twitter @DesignNine, and read about Design Nine's founder, Andrew Cohill, on Handshake 2.0 in Clicking Back Over the Years - Most Wired Town in America and Most Wired Town: Building Community One Click at a Time.  Design Nine announced The Wired Road - Integrated Fiber and Wireless Municipal Network.

Design Nine is a client of Handshake Media, Incorporated, the parent company of Handshake 2.0.

Broadband For America: The Third Way, a white paper by Andrew Cohill, is generating interest nationally for its new approach to solving America's broadband problems.  The paper proposes adopting a different business model and a different network architecture  to overcome the inherent financial shortcomings and network inefficiencies in existing telecom networks while keeping government out of direct competition with the private sector. The approach creates new business opportunities for existing service providers, including incumbents.  The strategy advocates separating services from infrastructure, using the time-tested "roads" model. The "third way" advocates building local and regional digital road systems managed much the same way communities build and manage vehicular road networks. 

A free copy of Andrew Cohill's white paper, Broadband For America: The Third Way, is available for download here.

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Design Nine builds networks that perform.  Design Nine provides broadband network planning, network design services, and network construction services to clients, communities, and regions throughout the U.S.  The firm has active projects in six states, with several fiber to the home (FTTH) projects in build out or operations, including the first municipal open access network in the U.S. Design Nine manages broadband fiber and wireless projects from beginning to end, including the initial assessment, design, construction, and operations phases.  The company is one of the most experienced open access broadband network design firms in the United States, and offers a full range of assessment, planning, financial analysis, business design, and project management for public and private networks.

To learn more, you can read the Design Nine blog, Technology Futures, follow Design Nine on Twitter @DesignNine, and read about Design Nine's founder, Andrew Cohill, on Handshake 2.0 in Clicking Back Over the Years - Most Wired Town in America and Most Wired Town: Building Community One Click at a Time.  Design Nine also announced The Wired Road - Integrated Fiber and Wireless Municipal Network.

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Design Nine is a client of Handshake Media, Incorporated, the parent company of Handshake 2.0.

Barry Welch, founder of Internet Databases and developer of FurnishWEB, a connectivity portal for the home furnishings industry, Anne Giles Clelland, founder of Handshake 2.0, a connector of people and portals, and Z. Kelly Queijo, founder of SmartCollegeVisit, a college visit portal with tools and resources for planning campus visit travel, share a Handshake 1.0.

Photo credit: Andrew Cohill

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It's still who you know!  You're invited to send us an image of you shaking hands with someone you know - a Handshake 1.0 - and we'll consider posting it in on Handshake 2.0.

Here are all the Handshake 1.0's on Handshake 2.0 and here's how to get your Handshake 1.0 on Handshake 2.0.

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Design Nine, Internet Databases and SmartCollegeVisit are clients of Handshake Media.

Andrew Cohill of Design Nine, a broadband connectivity expert, and Barry Welch, developer of FurnishWEB, a connectivity portal for the home furnishings industry, share a Handshake 1.0.

Design Nine provides visionary broadband network design and engineering services to clients, communities, and regions throughout the U.S.  To learn more, you can read the Design Nine blog, Technology Futures, follow Design Nine on Twitter @DesignNine, read about Design Nine in Design Nine Announces The Wired Road, and read about Design Nine's founder, Andrew Cohill, on Handshake 2.0 in Clicking Back Over the Years - Most Wired Town in America and Most Wired Town: Building Community One Click at a Time.

FurnishWEB is an online data management system for the home furnishings industry that expedites and systematizes order processing and product inventory tracking to optimize partnerships between manufacturers, dealers, sales representatives, staff, and customers. You can follow FurnishWEB on Twitter, become a FurnishWEB fan on Facebook, and read Barry Welch's blog.  FurnishWEB is an enterprise of Internet Databases, a custom web development company founded in 1999, located in the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center, Blacksburg, Virginia.

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It's still who you know!  You're invited to send us an image of you shaking hands with someone you know - a Handshake 1.0 - and we'll consider posting it in on Handshake 2.0.

Here are all the Handshake 1.0's on Handshake 2.0 and here's how to get your Handshake 1.0 on Handshake 2.0.

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Design Nine and Internet Databases are clients of Handshake 2.0.

Design Nine announced on April 18, 2009 that The Wired Road has begun full operations.  An official ribbon-cutting will take place at the Rex Theater, 113 E. Grayson Street, in Galax, Virginia, and the adjacent City Hall, on April 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM. 

The regional network is the largest integrated fiber and wireless open access, open services municipal network in the United States, and the high performance network will eventually provide services across more than 1,000 square miles of mountainous terrain in southwest Virginia.

The project is a collaboration among three local Virginia governments, including Grayson County, Carroll County, and the City of Galax. Crossroads Institute and Carroll County Public Schools are also partners in the effort.  Design Nine provided the early planning, developed the financial and business models for the project, designed the network architecture, and provided comprehensive project management services to get the network built.

Planning for the project began in early 2007, and construction started later in the fall of that year.  The first customers began using the system in mid-2008, and wireless residential and businesses customers can now request service connections. 

As an open access network, the project is unique among municipal broadband projects because all services are provided by private sector companies = the local governments are not selling any services to businesses and residents.

Andrew  Cohill, President of Design Nine, noted several other significant accomplishments, which include installing fiber in downtown Galax and deploying high performance wireless broadband to residents and businesses in portions of Carroll and Grayson counties that were completely unserved by broadband.

Cohill said, “Residents that have been on dial up have been stopping work crews and asking when they can get wireless and fiber services.  Everyone is anxious to get connected.”  

The fiber in Galax will provide connectivity not only to businesses but to organizations like the Galax city government and the Chestnut Creek School of the Arts.  The Twin County Regional Hospital has been using The Wired Road fiber since January.  The hospital’s switch to The Wired Road fiber got the institution a big increase in bandwidth with a sharp reduction in cost, and a local service provider was able to get the hospital’s Internet business for the first time.

Design Nine managed the entire network build out, which included vendor evaluation and selection, supervision of all the construction work, testing of the network, and installation of network management and monitoring software.  Design Nine also developed a complete set of business, financial, and operations policies and procedures for the regional authority that was created to run the network.

Design Nine’s high performance design provides 100 megabit fiber connections and  and multi-megabit wireless speeds. The project recently received additional funding that will expand wireless access in rural areas and will get fiber into every business park in the region.

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Design Nine provides visionary broadband network design and engineering services to clients, communities, and regions throughout the U.S.  The firm has active projects in eight states, with several fiber to the home (FTTH) projects in build out or operations, including the first municipal open network in the U.S. Design Nine manages broadband fiber and wireless projects from beginning to end, including the initial assessment, design, construction, and operations phases.  The company is one of the most experienced open access broadband network design firms in the United States, and offers a full range of assessment, planning, financial analysis, business design, and project management for public and private networks.

To learn more, you can read the Design Nine blog, Technology Futures, follow Design Nine on Twitter @DesignNine, and read about Design Nine's founder, Andrew Cohill, on Handshake 2.0 in Clicking Back Over the Years - Most Wired Town in America and Most Wired Town: Building Community One Click at a Time.

Handshake 2.0 asked, "What's the coolest tool in your office?"

From Andrew Cohill, President, Design Nine, Inc.

Design Nine, Inc. specializes in broadband planning, broadband project management, and broadband operations services.

We have two Fujitsu ScanSnaps, and the device has completely changed our workflow.  We scan all our project documents now--business cards, handwritten notes, maps, handouts, flyers, etc.  The machine is much faster than flat bed scanners, scans in color and scans both sides at the same time.  You can drop up to 50 pages of double-sided sheets into the feeder and it will scan them into a single PDF file in under one minute.  And it automatically saves a copy to your hard drive.

We still keep a few paper documents for archival storage, but the ability to scan anything is saving many hours of looking for paper documents.