Telemedicine certainly ranks high on the list of society-changing applications enabled by broadband. And it's not uncommon for independents to be among those pushing the application as part of their larger community development efforts.

Frontier Communications, which serves a section in northeastern Arizona among its various territories, is taking the concept and stretching it across an ocean. The carrier is now connecting a medical imaging clinic in Snowflake, Ariz., where patients can get X-rays performed, to Navapache Hospital in Lakeside, Ariz., 30 miles away, where the X-rays are read. However, during off-hours, X-rays and other medical scans are shipped several thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean and read in Australia.

“The hospital came to me wanting to connect the clinic, and they wanted high-speed transport,” said Randy Mifflin, an account manager at Frontier. “They said some other providers were offering microwave. He threw out 5 Mb/s to 10 Mb/s [as the desired bandwidth].”

Frontier was able to meet the bandwidth requirements, but instead of using microwave, the company is using its existing copper network and Actelis' Ethernet platform. The same technology also is being used to connect three movie theaters (see figure).

“The real benefit of using the Actelis solution is that we can leverage what we already have in the ground,” said Lynne Petersen, vice president of field operations for Frontier's Southwest territory. “If fiber is already there or the conduit is already there, fiber becomes extremely economical. But in most of our property, we have copper everywhere.”

In the hospital application, the connection between Snowflake and Lakeside is specified as a 10 Mb/s link, but it remains flexible, Mifflin said.

“End-to-end, it's 10 Mb/s, but as needed, they have 4.5 Mb/s connectivity to the Internet [which is how images get to Australia],” he said. “If nothing is going over the Net, they can have the full 10 Mb/s.”

While the application is pretty unique, offering Ethernet via copper is becoming increasingly popular among independents, said Yossi Saad, vice president of marketing for Actelis.

“Adding more fiber can be extremely expensive and to upgrade the Sonet is also expensive,” he said.

In Frontier's case, the company actually created an Ethernet overlay on top of its existing network, allowing it to take advantage of the same physical infrastructure and gain operational savings.

“You can't run service that is based on independent islands,” Saad said.

NAME: RICK VERGIN

TITLE: CEO

COMPANY: CHIBARDUN TELEPHONE COOPERATIVE/CTC TELCOM

PROJECT: LAUNCH VOICE OVER IP USING 700 MHZ WIRELESS INFRASTRUCTURE

Plant Stats: The company's ILEC group provides service to about 6500 lines in several towns and surrounding areas in northern Wisconsin, including Chippewa, Barron and Dunn. The CLEC, marketed as CTC, has grown to serve 8000 access lines.

Other vital information: The CLEC arm has been among the most aggressive. One of the earliest users of VDSL in the world, CTC has more recently been invading other telcos' turf using its licensed 700 MHz spectrum to provide broadband and VoIP. The company is working with Associated Network Partners Inc., which is providing equipment for the new service.

On offering VoIP: We call it i.call. We offer it over anybody's broadband, but we also offer it over our 700 MHz on a fixed basis. We actually prefer they take 700 MHz service because we have more control over the bandwidth quality.

On the reason for using wireless: We've been waiting on the FCC or Congress to do something about inter-carrier compensation or universal service in regards to our CLEC. We've done well but gotten gun shy about spending millions on infrastructure until we get a better idea of what they're going to do. We own 700 MHz licenses in about an eight-county area. We put towers up in communities where we would normally be CLECing. That's our answer until we get the FCC to make up its mind.

On expanding that service: The other thing we want to do is overlay the 700 MHz with unlicensed spectrum. Bandwidth isn't all that tremendous with 700 MHz. We're in the process of evaluating vendors now. We've got the towers in place so we could use the same structures. We can reach out into the county about 15 miles with the towers we've got. The real thing we're after is a regional wireless play. The main problem with a wireless service in a rural area is once the customer gets inside their house, the phone doesn't work. With VoIP and a Wi-Fi router, we'll be able to have service inside the house. Our goal is to keep them on wireless VoIP as much as we can and then go to cellular only when our service isn't there.

On CTC: Today we have net income and have had net income since 1999. If we knew that it was not going to change, we'd be burying fiber all the way to the home. But absent that, the 700 MHz allows us to provide data and voice, and hopefully, we can build on that. Most of the areas we're going into are CenturyTel areas and Telephone USA, which is part of what CenturyTel acquired from GTE. We're in areas that we haven't CLECed before.

On the target audience and challenges Right now we're only targeting residential. We've only been doing this for a couple of months. We've struggled with quality of service through different kinds of equipment. We've finally gotten to the point where we've got some managed switches and equipment that throttles peer-to-peer to help the voice over IP. We have a good quality of service with bandwidth that is set aside for VoIP. We still ran into problems with clipping. We struggled for quite a while to find out why. We had to learn as we go. There aren't a lot of people around who know about VoIP. There are lots of people that know the Vonage model, but when we're doing the stuff we're doing, you can't follow that.

On marketing i.call as a lifeline: We have 911. Works just like the [public network]. Because we have our own network, we're able to use VoIP to transport back to our central office, and once we get it there, put it in the [public network] and go to the public-safety answering point. We also sell a [uninterruptible power supply] with the service so they have battery back-up. Our aim is to have it as reliable as the [public network]. We're not quite there yet, but that's our aim.