September 19, 2006 – the Tryon Daily Bulletin – www.tryondailybulletin.com

e-Polk Inc., the three-year-old non-profit operating 10 miles of fiber optic network in Polk County, has contracted with Northland Communications Corp. to build an additional 34 miles of fiber line.

Advantage West-North Carolina, the Western North Carolina Regional Economic Development Commission, awarded e-Polk Inc. $417,000 last July. The grant calls for e-Polk to build at least 72 strands of fiber optic cable from Mill Spring to Rutherfordton in order to supply high-speed, low-cost bandwidth to the new Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center in downtown Rutherfordton.

Since the grant award was announced, e-Polk Inc. board members and project managers Keven McCammon and Jeff Byrd have been working to design and achieve full funding for the best route to Rutherfordton. The route chosen will run from Lake Lure south on Hwy. 9, past Sunny View Elementary and Polk Central School, to Sandy Plains Road following Sandy Plains east to Hwy. 221 and following that north to downtown Rutherfordton.

The longer route, serving more of Polk County and Rutherford County than a straight shot down Hwy. 108, was made possible with contributions from Northland Communications Corp. as well as Polk County Schools, Rutherford County Government and Foothills Connect, in addition to the grant funding. Northland Communications Corp. is the cable television franchisee for eastern Polk County and Rutherford County.

The project includes an extension of the Polk County government network. The Polk County Board of Commissioners voted this year to exercise the county’s option with e-Polk Inc., paying the incremental cost to add another 12 strands of fiber to that portion of the new build within Polk County borders.

In addition to supporting the project with a contribution, Rutherford County Government is also paying to extend the fiber build from Foothills Connect to its county annex in downtown Rutherfordton. Polk County Schools plans to connect both Sunny View and Polk Central schools to its existing school network.

The total cost of the project is $603,500. Northland Communications Corp. officers said they hope to complete the construction by the end of the year.

“We are very pleased that we found a way to get the most fiber connectivity possible in these two counties with the grant money available,” said McCammon. “With the help of these partners we were able to move from a 14-mile route to a 34-mile route, bringing the fiber to many more locations.”

e-Polk Inc. was formed in 2003 with a $375,000 grant from the Rural Internet Access Authority, now the e-NC Authority. e-Polk completed the original network, which is doing business as PANGAEA Internet, in July 2003. At that time, e-Polk hung 144 strands of fiber on the power poles running from the railroad tracks at Sidestreet Pizza in Tryon to Polk County High School. Additional help was received in the form of a $22,750 grant from the Polk County Community Foundation.

In 2005, the PANGAEA network was extended again 2.5 miles to the Polk County Middle School campus with $70,000 funding from Polk County. At that time, Polk County also purchased the rights to use 12 strands along the entire existing network for a government network and the right to place 12 strands in any new construction.

While extending PAN-GAEA to Mill Spring, the management of Cooper-Riis decided to pay for the fiber to be run an additional mile to the Cooper-Riis Healing Farm Road campus east of Hwy. 9 on Hwy. 108.

e-Polk’s PANGAEA network today serves the Town of Tryon, Polk County Government, Polk County Schools, Isothermal Community College, the Polk County Public Library, the Polk County Health Department two Internet Service Providers and ten area businesses.

December 13, 2005 – the Tryon Daily Bulletin – www.tryondailybulletin.com

If “connectivity” is the new economic highway, Polk County appears to be poised to compete with the world for the best jobs, e-Polk Inc. board members said in their annual report to the public last week. e-Polk’s PANGAEA fiber optic network, which went live in July, 2004, has already grown from seven to ten miles in length and may by next spring grow to 42 miles, they reported. PANGAEA will be a key link in the regional fiber network being developed by Congressman Charles Taylor, ERC Broadband network director Hun-ter Goosman said.

Already benefits are being felt. Since operations began, e-Polk Inc.’s biggest customer by far, Polk County Schools, has been able to quadruple its service at half the price. In anticipation of having fiber connectivity, the new Polk County Library building will be equipped for state-of-the-art services. New residential neighborhoods in Polk County are providing fiber-to-the-home options.

Growing need for bandwidth

Speaking to an audience of 75 community leaders, technology vendors and interested citizens last Tuesday at Polk County Middle School, schools technology director Dave Scherping told a story which illustrated the growing need for bandwidth.

It used to be that a “56 kilobit” data line – carrying 56,000 “bits” of data per second – could handle everything Polk County Schools needed, a few emails sent back and forth, said Scherping, an e-Polk Board member. But use of the Internet grew, and soon Scherping said the schools were leasing a “T1” line, carrying 1.5 million bits per second (Mb/s), roughly enough for 24 phone calls at the same time. (1.5 Mb/s is a typical home Internet user’s DSL and cable modem speed.)

At first, Scherping said, the schools leased just one T1 to serve the Stearns Administration building, but later branched out technology offerings to all six school buildings as well as the county bus garage, leasing multiple T1s.

Even that wasn’t going to be adequate as 2004 approached.

“e-Polk came along at just the right time,” Scherping said.

e-Polk offers options

e-Polk was formed in 2001 to take advantage of a statewide initiative, the Rural Internet Access Authority (RIAA), which amassed a $30 million grant pool aimed at bringing the prosperity realized in N.C.’s Research Triangle to the state’s rural counties by leveling the technology playing field.

The e-Polk citizen advisory group, under the leadership of Polk County librarian Mark Pumphrey and project director Ken Rossen, in 2002 won grants of $375,000 from the RIAA and $22,750 from the Polk County Community Foundation to build a seven-mile fiber optic network. e-Polk formed a nonprofit corporation in January 2003 to own and operate that network, which at first stretched just from Sidestreet Pizza in Tryon to Polk County High School.

The network went live in July, 2004 and today is profitable with 18 customers along Hwy. 108 and money in the bank, said e-Polk Inc. president Jeff Byrd (also publisher of the Tryon Daily Bulletin and author of this article).

e-Polk growth

This year, Polk County paid to extend the network two miles to the new middle school, and Cooper-Riis Healing Farm paid to continue that extension yet another mile to serve its healing and research facilities.

As e-Polk operations grew, a timely $70,000 grant from Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation last summer allowed the e-Polk Inc. board to hire Stu Davidson as Technical Account Manager. Davidson was a programmer and technical support consultant in Atlanta for 25 years before moving to Lake Lanier in 2001. e-Polk’s only paid staff, Davidson now maintains the network operations and works with customers and potential clients on a daily basis from offices on the second floor of the Tryon Town Hall.

e-Polk Inc. board member Keven McCammon, a technology business consultant, described the current e-Polk network extension project to participants at last Tuesday’s meeting. McCammon said the extension project has been funded by a $417,000 grant from Advantage West, the state department of commerce economic development office for Western North Carolina. With that money, McCammon said e-Polk hopes to partner with a cable company to build as much as 32 miles of additional fiber by spring 2006.

The grant requires that e-Polk connect to the new Foothills Connect Business & Technology Center being developed in downtown Rutherfordton, but McCammon said e-Polk hopes to build a route from Lake Lure down Hwy. 9 to Sandy Plains Road and out Sandy Plains Road to Rutherfordton.

Developers need connectivity

McCammon said he is also working as a private consultant with Bright’s Creek and other developers in the area to bring fiber to the new residences in those communities.

“Real estate agents are already starting to say that if there is no high speed service available, their clients cannot buy because they cannot operate their businesses or their life-style without it,” McCammon said.

By coincidence, McCammon said Bright’s Creek had begun pulling fiber through conduits laid along its new streets in Sunny View that same day.

PANGAEA, ERC Broadband

Hunter Goosman, director of ERC Broadband, the keynote speaker for the e-Polk meeting Tuesday, said he and the Education Research Consortium (ERC) board see the growing PANGAEA network in Polk County as central to filling in a key gap in the ERC’s regional network. He showed a map of that network, with e-Polk’s PANGAEA providing a spiderweb connection between Spartanburg, Rutherfordton, Black Mountain, Asheville and Hendersonville.

ERC began as a project between college presidents in the region and Congressman Charles Taylor. Today ERC operates a high performance computing center and storage area network in Asheville, and provides services to the National Weather Service data center. Its fiber optic network, ERC Broadband, is steadily growing to connect colleges and institutions and smaller networks like e-Polk throughout Western North Carolina and Upstate S.C. The ERC network first went live in 2003, Goosman said.

Cost-effective speed for Polk County Schools

e-Polk’s July, 2004 PANGAEA network operations start-up came just in the nick of time for Polk County Schools, Scherping said. The state was beginning a project that fall, called NC Wise, in which every teacher would be required, instead of scribbling daily attendance in a book, to go on-line to log attendance in the State Department of Education computer servers in Raleigh. Now, every morning, state administrators know exactly how many students are in school across the state.

Scherping provided an overhead projection graph of Polk County Schools’s Internet usage clearly showing the early morning spikes each day when every teacher goes on line at once to take attendance.

“We could not have done it with T1s,” Scherping said.

Scherping’s office today supports more than 1,000 computers in school offices and classrooms around the county.

“With e-Polk’s PANGAEA network, we went from 1.5 Mb/s to 6 Mb/s. That level of service would not have been available to us at a cost effective basis without e-Polk,” Scherping said. The schools got four times the Internet capacity at less than half the cost multiple T1 lines, he said.

Centralized computing

Not only did Scherping get cost-effective service, but all school facilities were connected to a central school computer network, some with direct PANGAEA fiber connections. Polk County Schools owns a few strands of fiber within the 144-strand e-Polk sheath for their school network. Providing direct fiber connections to those schools not directly connected today is a goal of e-Polk, officers said. Polk County government also owns fibers within the e-Polk sheath for a government network.

A single fiber can carry all the phone traffic of the city of Charlotte. Technology experts call fiber “future proof” because, using the speed of light, its capacity is only limited by the capacity of the equipment to which it is hooked up. By connecting all those school computers, Scherping said he has been able to aggregate a lot of school computer work in one central set of servers. Instead of buying six copies of each needed software package, all the schools share one. Instead of making paper copies of job applicant resumes and physically sending them all around, principals now can view them digitally on their office computers. Purchase orders are all handled from one system, as is bus route mapping.

Teachers in most every Polk County School classroom benefit from plentiful bandwidth and Internet access today, Scherping said. Reference works needed by students and teachers are available on-line.

“It used to be that every kid in the library had to stand around waiting for one student to finish with the ‘R’ encyclopedia,” he said. “Now everyone can have access to it at the same time.” Teachers also can all access state reference materials on standard curriculum and lesson planning.

New Polk middle school: State of the art technology

The new Polk County Middle School took full advantage of the technology available today with, among other things, video conferencing equipment. Using that, students can talk to other students across the state, or share one teacher across wide regions. In one application, Scherping said fourth graders across the state are sharing their experiences in video conferences these days, mountain dwellers telling coastal residents about their lives as part of the social studies curriculum.

Students are “blogging” and creating websites, and teachers are creating websites for parents to use to monitor classroom activities. Teachers are accessing digital video libraries with video materials on thousands of subjects.

High tech for all at library

Mark Pumphrey, vice president of e-Polk Inc., said the new county library building will also be taking advantage of the plentiful and affordable bandwidth e-Polk’s PANGAEA network provides. The library will have five computers in the children’s room, 12 computers in the public Internet access area, and four computers to operate the book catalog system.

Pumphrey said the state Rural Internet Access Authority goals, in addition to expanding access to bandwidth as e-Polk has done with PANGAEA, include providing public Internet access, training and applications. For instance, he said e-Polk would like to help the county develop a countywide Geographic Information System and an e-commerce website where people can transact county business on-line.

“The technology infrastructure in the new library building will be state of the art,” Pumphrey said. “There will be laptop plug-ins and wireless connections available. In the future, we hope to have Radio Frequency Identification Tags (RFID) on books so people can use self-check-out stations. The community meeting room is outfitted and ready for equipment to do video conferencing and distance learning.”

Bright future

e-Polk board member Jim Edwards, planning director for the Isothermal Planning District Commission, said that fiber optic “connectivity” is the highway system in the new world economy.

“We are going to get a network that we can compete with anyone in the world,” he said. “If we are smart about it, Polk County can be as attractive as any place in the world.”

December 5, 2005 – the Tryon Daily Bulletin – www.tryondailybulletin.com

Consider the new Polk County Middle School. The technology at the middle school is so new that the vendors had to be educated about the equipment, said Dave Scherping, director of technology for the Polk County School System.

“When we put bids out we had a problem because nobody in the area had done the level of video, audio and data integration that we wanted to do,” he said.

The school district even waited as long as possible to seek bids so that the latest technology could be acquired, according to Polk County Schools Superintendent Bill Miller.

The result is a state-of-the-art middle school, with technological resources that excite teachers and students alike. But many of those resources are dependent on affordable high speed Internet access, and until recently the cost of that access had been almost prohibitively expensive.

As recently as early 2004, the school system had been leasing high-speed telephone lines, known as T-1 lines, to connect the schools to the central office, and the central office to the Internet. But the lines were expensive, and Scherping knew he would soon need more speed than the T-1 lines could provide.

Fortunately, Scherping had been a member of the advisory committee of e-Polk, the local grass roots organization that had won a grant to develop a fiber optic cable network right through the middle of the county. The fiber optic project, called PANGAEA (pan-gee’-ah), would widen local access “roads” to the information highway, allowing far more traffic at much higher speeds.

It promised to be just the solution the school system needed, and Scherping, now on the board of directors of the nonprofit corporation, arranged for the school system to become one of the first customers.

“We essentially quadrupled our Internet capacity, and at less than half the cost of what multiple T-1 lines would have required,” said Scherping. “What’s more, we’re only utilizing a fraction of the fiber optic strands that are bundled in the PANGAEA network.”

Scherping and other volunteer PANGAEA board members are convinced that high speed Internet access will be a major drawing card in Polk County’s ongoing economic development effort to recruit new, low-impact enterprises.

“I live and work in this community,” said Scherping, “and it gives me real satisfaction to participate in such a win-win partnership. PANGAEA’s unique nonprofit status is one of the reasons the school system is able to afford the tremendous level of connectivity we’re enjoying. By becoming one of PAN-GAEA’s first customers, we’re contributing to a movement that will have a direct or indirect benefit for everyone in the county in the years ahead.”

On Tuesday, Dec. 6 at 6:30 p.m., e-Polk is sponsoring a public meeting to bring the community up to date on advances in connectivity at the middle school, and to give people an opportunity to meet some of the Internet service providers, hosting services and other computer-related businesses that have arisen over the past few years.

The keynote speaker for the event is Hunter Goosmann, director of network operations for the education and research consortium of the Western Carolinas. Goosmann, who leads ERC’s Broadband project in supporting and expanding the existing fiber optic network in the region, will address the interdependence of regional networks and their ability to enhance one another.

Other speakers will include Jim Edwards, planning director for the Isothermal Planning & Development Commission, Keven McCammon, project manager for Advantage West, Dave Scherping, technology and accountability director for Polk County Schools, and Stu Davidson, technical account manager of e-Polk.

The meeting will be held at the newly completed Polk Middle School, which is located on Wolverine Trail just off Hwy 108 near the intersection of Hwy 9 in Mill Spring. Light refreshments and vendor exhibitors will be available at 6:30 p.m.; the speakers will begin at 7 p.m.

October 19, 2004 – the Tryon Daily Bulletin – www.tryondailybulletin.com

Technology advances have opened many new avenues for teaching and learning in today’s schools, but they have also presented an array of challenges. Not only do computers, peripheral hardware and software need to be kept up to date, all those computers need to be connected to the Internet.

For the past year and a half, Dave Scherping, director of technology and accountability for Polk County Schools, has known the schools’ connection to the information highway wouldn’t be able to handle the traffic much longer.

Consider the fact that 900 computers are in use by students and school personnel throughout the school system. By the end of last year, the phone lines that supported the Internet connection were completely filled for 60-70% of the school day.

Students conduct research using NCWISEowl, a sophisticated database purchased and provided by the State Department of Education; online encyclopedias and maps offer sound and video along with text references. Teachers and administrators have additional needs for research and communication. And they all take up space in the stream of data coursing through the schools’ pipe to the Internet.

To support all that Internet traffic, the school system had been leasing high-power telephone lines, known as T-1 lines, connecting the schools to the central office, and the central office to the Internet. But the lines were expensive, and Scherping knew he would soon need more of them if Polk County schools were to stay in step with other good school systems around the state.

Scherping had budgeted for connection costs up to $8,000 per month, using existing services. But, thanks to the new fiber optic connectivity available in Polk County through the e-Polk Inc. PANGAEA network, Scherping was able to buy all the connectivity Polk County Schools need for $3,000 a month, and that price is expected to drop, not rise, over time.

Fortunately, Scherping had been a member of the advisory committee of e-Polk, the local grass roots organization that had won a grant to develop a fiber optic cable network right through the middle of the county. The fiber optic project, called PANGAEA(PAN-GEE’-AH), would widen local access “roads” to the information highway, allowing far more traffic at much higher speeds.

It promised to be just the solution the school system needed, and Scherping, now on the Board of Directors of the nonprofit corporation, arranged for the school system to become one of the first customers. Because of their central locations, Polk County High School, Tryon Elementary School, Forbes Preschool and the Administrative offices in Columbus are now all connected directly to each other on fiber leased from e-Polk, and to the Internet through PANGAEA.

Scherping looks forward to the day when the schools’ internal fiber network can be expanded to include Polk Central and Tryon Middle School. For now, those two schools continue to use T-1 lines for their access to the central office.

“We have essentially quadrupled our Internet capacity, and at less than half the cost of what multiple T-1 lines would have required,” said Scherping.

“What’s more, we’re only utilizing a fraction of the fiber optic strands that are bundled in the PANGAEA network. The capacity’s already in place for us to expand at some date in the future, no matter how many more customers come on line.”

Scherping and other volunteer PANGAEA board members are convinced that high speed Internet access will be a major drawing card in Polk County’s ongoing economic development effort to recruit new, low-impact enterprises.

“I live and work in this community,” said Scherping, “and it gives me real satisfaction to participate in such a win-win partnership.

“PANGAEA’s unique nonprofit status is one of the reasons the school system is able to afford the tremendous level of connectivity we’re enjoying.

“And by becoming one of PANGAEA’s first customers, we’re contributing to a movement that will have a direct or indirect benefit for everyone in the county in the years ahead.”

For more information about PANGAEA, call Jeff Byrd, president, e-Polk Inc., at 859-2737 x106, or Dave Scherping, technical director, e-Polk Inc., 817-0818.

— article by Nancy Hiley