Colrain High Speed Internet Project - Phase1 Status

Click here to view a satellite image of this location. If your home falls within the range of the reddish colored circle, then you most likely will be able to obtain high speed wireless internet access.

NOTE: The 400 meter coverage area is best condition estimates. The closer you are to our antenna, the better your chances of getting it.

September 13'th 2006 - As many of you are aware, Megatron applied for a grant from the USDA Community Connect Broadband Program to obtain the funds necessary to finance this project. We received notice today that our grant application was denied.

Unfortunately this news is going to have a severe impact on the progress of this project. We are at this time still working out the details of how were are going to proceed without the grant funds. Project advancement will be very slow at this point due to lack of funds. I will post back later when we have determined the next step.

July 6'th 2006 - Megatron took a helicopter ride through colrain today looking at the view from locations we wanted to target based on information we obtained from satellite maps. We found that some of those locations would be unsuitable for various reasons. Mostly having to do with surrounding hills blocking the view. We did however find several locations, 3 of which would be best for us to start with as these 3 locations alone would cover a large part of colrains population.

We have some photos online here that we took while we were circling the area. We will caption those photos later as to the direction and latitude and longitude coordinates as soon as we look at the rest of our data.

The ride was enjoyable. A nice break from the office. You think you have to pay a lot at the pump? You should see what fuel for that helicopter costs.

March 1'st 2006 - We checked out a possible antenna site location today as mentioned as a possible location to service the foundry village area. This location is where the towns emergency horns are located. However we have determined this location to be unsuitable. Placing antennas on those poles will not clear the trees, also even if we were to erect our own tower at that location we would not be able to cover most everything to the southeast, south, and southwest of that location due to the elevation of the rest of the hill being 400-500 feet higher than that location. Thus that exact location is unsuitable. We will have to see if the town also owns the land at the highest elevation before we can completely rule out that location.

February 27'th 2006 - By the end of next week at the latest we will have 5 customers on our new wireless service. It has been a rough couple of weeks as we hashed out some minor reliability problems with the service. This issue has been found, and things seem quite well.

There are a couple of things that must be pointed out so those that are on the service now, and those that will be in the near future will know.

First, we advertise a maximum rate of 728K as the speed of the service. Most of those that are on the service now are seeing rates much higher than this. This is because we have not fully implemented bandwidth limiting on the service yet. Enjoy it now while it is available because it will not stay that way.

Second, we previously offered leases on end user equipment. The recent hookups we have done have proven to us that this lease option is not going to work for us, thus we have been forced to discontinue it. Below is the explanation as quoted from a letter I wrote.

Start of notification letter.
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Megatron Data Systems is discontinuing our lease option for wireless equipment. 

When we first offered this we felt it was a good idea, but are finding out that it is placing too much of a financial burden on this company thus we cannot continue to offer it. 

This is due to the fact that wireless hookup costs are running on the average twice what we had originally predicted. 

Most locations require between $150 to $200 worth of equipment to hookup. At a 5 dollar per month lease cost it would take us 30-40 months to recover the costs of those hookups. 

Thus, the lease option is being replaced with 3 other options. 

Option 1. We will offer a 10% discount on the cost of the equipment if the equipment is purchased outright.

Option 2. We will offer a 5% discount if the equipment is paid for in 3 monthly payments. The discount will be reapplied if one of the payments is missed. 

Option 3. The equipment can be purchased in 6 monthly payments. However there are no discounts with this option. The equipment is purchased at full price. 

There is also an extended warranty option that can be purchased for $5.00 per month. Under this extended warranty we will replace any equipment that fails under normal use for as long as you purchase wireless service through us. The warranty stops when you discontinue your service or drop the extended warranty coverage.

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End of notification letter.

For some good news. It looks like there may be a strong possibility we will be able to start offering wireless service in the Foundry Village area within a few weeks. We are going to be looking things over and hashing out details this week.

All in all, things are starting to look good with this project. Hopefully it will continue.

January 26'st 2006 - Our signal problem that occurred during upgrades last week has now been corrected, and our 3'rd wireless customer is now online.

January 21'st 2006 - We completed our planned hardware upgrades on the 20'th. However we have run into a compatibility issue that has degraded signal strength. Our current coverage area is not as large as it was do to this minor setback.

We have more parts on order to correct this issue, and that repair is expected to take place this coming Thursday on the 26'th

Also on the 20'th we connected another user to the system. Unfortunately due to the signal problems we were unable to hook up a 3'rd user further down the road. That will be done Thursday as well when we correct the signal strength problem.

January 13'th 2006 - The project is currently slow going. At this point only 20 people sparsely spread out around colrain, and 1 in Shelburne have even contacted us about this project. At this point we have 1 person in our location connected to the service, and another will be hooked up next week at the time we upgrade our current system.

Word does not seem to be spreading as fast as we had hoped. We had quoted a price to someone on how much it costs us to setup a location that was unfortunately not accurate. The price quoted to us was for the wrong type of tower. We now have a more accurate price. Each tower location we setup will cost between $5000-$8000 depending on height and amount of equipment we put on it. Total town coverage will cost an estimated $140,000. That will increase as time goes by because steel prices are climbing which is what the towers are made of.

As you can see, it takes a lot of $12 payments to pay for something like this. This is the reason we are funneling computer repair and sales funds into this. Our monthly service prices are simply not high enough to accomplish this task. We are funneling everything we got into this, and it still barely makes a dent.

Our Greenfield area customers are dropping like files switching to DSL which makes this even harder. As more people drop the service, the less we have to work with.

We also will be using funds obtained from each person we hook up to this service to help pay for it as well, so the more people that want it, the faster we can get this going. We may be able to obtain additional funds from outside sources if we can show a demand.

So please, spread the word, let people know what we are trying to do. Have them call us and let us know they want it.

January 5'th 2006 - Some area residents have been informed of the pending project. Interest in the project looks good at this point.

January 1'st 2006 - Mapping of the town has begun. We also are making plans to upgrade our current wireless location to bring it's broadcasting power to it's maximum, and to improve compatibility with the available customer premise equipment we can get for this project. Expected upgrade time is about 1-2 weeks from now.