Broadband Communities

2014 Summit Special Preview

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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44 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. Register Now www.bbcmag.com BBC_SummitPromo_Feb14.indd 44 2/12/14 5:52 PM

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