37
Above:
All Rural Broadband
sessions drew big crowds
at the 2013 Summit.
Tey are sure to do
so again for this
year's event.
I frst worked for the state as the Secretary of
Administration responsible for the business
side of government. It started with fve colleges
connected by microwave (UNC Chapel
Hill, NC State, Duke and Wake Forest, and
UNC-Charlotte). In
1977 we moved to
create an integrated
distributive network
across the state,
available to colleges
and universities. We
put computing, video,
telephone and data on the same lines and took
12 separate mainframes down by networking
state government operations. We were of to the
information highway, but just barely.
In 1984 I left and went to work for ITT
Corporation's Network Systems Group as
Director and later as a vice president. Tis
was one of the frst multinational worldwide
telecommunications corporations. It did
business in more than a 120 countries. When
the frst rewrite of American telecom rules
took place, ITT continued to sell services and
equipment worldwide, but not to AT&T; (which
had Western Electric) in the US. Although ITT
could not sell equipment to AT&T;, it could sell
to US independent
companies like United
Telephone and GTE.
At ITT, we
deployed the frst
digital network for
NATO-Europe. At
that time, NATO-
Europe had more than 20 large procurement
contracts. Many were in default, including
ITT's. We worked hard to rectify that and
our digital network, I was told, was the only
contract of its size and complexity that was
actually delivered. It meant $900,000 to the
ITT bottom line. And NATO joined the
digital world.
I left ITT Telecom-Networks group after we
worked with the French to create ITT-Alcatel
North Carolina frsts include
ATM-SONET and Integrated
Community Networks
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