This Project Wouldn’t Have Been Approved Without RDOF Funds And Wouldn’t Have Been Financially Feasible Without Vitruvi™
In taking advantage of the dollars that have started flowing for broadband builds, the speed and cost to do those builds often will come down to smart engineering, great software, and important partnerships.
A case in point: During the past three months Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative (CCEC) on the southern Oregon coast had a real challenge on its hands. The rural co-op’s Board of Directors wanted to provide equitable fiber-broadband service to every one of its 14,000 members across its geographically-isolated service area, stretching along Oregon’s coast from Coos Bay down to the California border. But doing so would create significant financial risk for the cooperative.
“We’re surrounded by ocean, mountains, and forest. I needed construction management software that could meet the high demands of our engineering team (Conexon) and help to manage our construction partners, many of whom had never experienced the geographic challenges of building a fiber network in Southwest Oregon,” recalled Paul Recanzone, General Manager of CCEC’s wholly owned subsidiary, Beacon Broadband. They were, he concedes, walking into a project with a high-level of financial risk. Coos-Curry had successfully applied for Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) funding and charged Recanzone, with making it all work.
Recanzone turned to the team at Vitruvi™, the telcom construction-management software platform, with a simple challenge: create efficiencies rarely seen before in the fiber-broadband industry, to help make the Coos-Curry/Beacon Broadband fiber project financially feasible. As he explains it: “Vitruvi™ is a very rich environment that gave me the visibility and transparency I required to measure daily spend and production against budget,” he added. “It essentially saved our network.”
The two teams quickly got to work. Here’s what they did:
Justin Reid, Vitruvi’s Vice President of Sales, explained that his company’s construction management software was able to take the ambiguities out of the Coos-Curry fiber buildout.
“It used to be that a client like Beacon Broadband would assign huge buckets of money to various aspects of a network construction project without any realistic ability to provide oversight or quality control. But our platform, Vitruvi™ creates unparalleled efficiencies and transparency to help direct the construction team toward the ultimate goal of getting customers on the network. We were really pleased to partner with Paul and the entire Beacon Broadband team on this exciting and challenging construction project,” he said.
Thus far, CCEC’s Beacon Broadband fiber project is on-track. Recanzone can open his Vitruvi™ app on his mobile device or laptop at any point in the day, to see the latest data that vendors provide on daily spend and budget against production. Importantly, Recanzone says he’s able to have a clear picture of what Beacon’s anticipated spend is, so he and his team can shorten the window between capital expenditure and revenue generation.
“This project wouldn’t have been approved without RDOF funds, and wouldn’t have been financially feasibly without Vitruvi™, said Recanzone.
About Beacon Broadband, Inc.
Beacon Broadband is a wholly owned subsidiary of Coos-Curry Electric Cooperative (CCEC). CCEC has served the area for over 80 years. Beacon Broadband belongs to the communities it serves and shares the same mission and values as CCEC. Beacon Broadband provides innovative broadband services that close the digital divide between urban areas and our region. CCEC is a member of NRECA and Touchstone. www.beaconbroadband.com
About Vitruvi™
Developed by a team that has “lived the problem of deploying complex network projects.” Vitruvi™ is an innovative end-to-end telecom construction software platform that greatly improves project efficiencies. Vitruvi™ redefines the precision of infrastructure wireless and wireline construction project management (CM) by seamlessly converting GIS designs into a web and mobile app-based construction management solution. Vitruvi™ aggregates designs, documents, timelines, and construction data to form a single source-of-truth that all project stakeholders can refer to. Being fully GIS-enabled with an emphasis on user experience, users can access real-time construction management of timelines, schedule of values, labor, and materials. Vitruvi™ is available on desktop and on mobile Android and iOS devices. Discover more at www.vitruvisoftware.com.