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FUN FIBER FACTS:
Rollie Cole's Observations
Rollie Cole's Observations on
Broadband Benefts
Policy analyst, author and attorney Cole has a
special love of infrastructure improvements that
create "fertile ground" for sowing and growing
many businesses,
rather than simply
providing special help
for one. Some tales:
Simple for
Surgeons
I have heard of a
surgeon who would
get calls in the middle
of the night about whether a patient (often
a patient new to the ER) needed immediate
surgery. He would ask the technician to describe
the medical image (MRI, or X-ray or something
similar). If the re was any question, however, he
would get up, get dressed, travel to the hospital
and often fnd that the situation could have
waited until the morning.
But once the surgeon got even slow-speed
broadband (starting with DSL), he could look
at the images at home in his pajamas before
making a decision whether to travel or not. At
frst, it took signifcant time for the images to
download, but when he upgraded to AT&T;
uVerse, the download time from his major
hospital was acceptable.
He started having
patients at a second
hospital, but the
downloads took so
many minutes, that
he threatened to shift
all his patients away
from that hospital.
Te second hospital
was able to resolve the
situation at its end, but everyone had learned
that not only did the hospital need good
broadband connections, so did its doctors in
their ofces and homes.
Te doctor may not be doing much
uploading of medical images from home, but as
all medical records get more electronic, he or she
is very likely to need to move records from one
ofce to another or from an ofce to a hospital,
and medical images are very large fles. Upload
speed then joins download in importance.
Above:
Rollie Cole
Senior Fellow
Sagamore Institute for
Policy Research
Above right:
Attendee taking notes
during one of last
year's Economic
Development sessions.
Summit with Rollie Cole on
Economic Development.
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