John Dilbeck Musings

BRMEMC.NET Launches High Speed Internet Technology Initiative Focused on Advanced Data, Communications and Entertainment to Homes and Businesses

YOUNG HARRIS, GA – May 15, 2006 - BRMEMC.NET announced today that it intends to bring High Speed Internet Connectivity to Members of Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation. Service will be delivered by deployment of emerging Technologies such as Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH), Broadband over Power Line (BPL) and High Speed Wireless (Wi-Fi).

With this service, BRMEMC.NET will be addressing the growing need for widely accessible data and communications to homes and businesses. Currently, access is available only in limited areas due to the constraints of telephone lines and equipment. By deploying a wide-area fiber network in conjunction with BPL and Wi-Fi, limitations such as geography and/or distance can be overcome.

At the end of 2005, BRMEMC.NET purchased fiber that encircles the entire BRMEMC service area. This fiber will serve as the backbone of our new data and communications network. From this backbone, fiber can be run directly to homes and businesses or can be used to feed Wi-Fi Access Points and BPL.

Brian Anderson, Director of Internet Services for BRMEMC.net said, “Our investment in a regional self-healing fiber-optic network will help us provide broadband services to many of our members that have never before had the option of high-speed Internet.”

Members will have access to reliable, high speed Internet connectivity and new options for data, voice and video. Bandwidth can be used to simultaneously provide high speed Internet access, phone service, video, and a host of other exciting features.

Response to this new project has been immediate and larger than expected. Local Real Estate Developers are already requesting that fiber be installed in existing neighborhoods, and many are planning for fiber to be installed simultaneously with electric utilities in new developments.

High speed Internet service will be priced comparably to DSL, but will offer higher speeds. Additional services such as telephone service or Voice Over IP (VoIP), Video, etc., will be offered through strategic alliances and/or partnerships with other service providers. Pricing for additional services will be forthcoming as those projects develop.

An online form has been created to assist in planning the deployment schedule. Customers can submit a response form at www.brmemc.net/response which will be analyzed to determine areas with the greatest initial need. Areas with no high speed Internet access will be given priority, and the goal will be to serve as many members as is possible. Keep an eye out for announcements for a deployment schedule on the web site at www.brmemc.net.

Blue Ridge Mountain Electric Membership Corporation is a member-owned electric cooperative headquartered in Young Harris, Georgia, serving over 45,000 customers in Cherokee and Clay Counties in Western North Carolina, and Towns, Union and Fannin Counties in Northeast Georgia. Organized locally in 1937, BRMEMC has invested nearly $100 million in physical infrastructure in its mission to provide reliable electric services to its members where those services would not otherwise have been available. In 2002, BRMEMC.NET began operation with a similar mission in mind: to provide high-speed Internet connectivity to our underserved region. Now over 3,000 customers strong, BRMEMC.net is forging ahead in its effort to make the Western North Carolina and North Georgia region a leader in the technology age.

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.

As part of the recent reorganization of GeorgiaDragRacing.com, David has moved the news page to a new Blog at gdrn.blogspot.com.

There, you’ll find news and information about drag racing in Georgia, updated whenever there is something worthy of reporting.

For reasons associated with hacking activity on our account, I’ve been forced to completely rebuild GeorgiaDragRacing.com. All 2,000+ pages have been rebuilt and uploaded to the site, and that’s what has kept me very busy for the last couple of weeks or so.

Fortunately, all of my large sites are built using Radio Userland’s database and scripting abilities. It takes some of the work out of managing them, and even rebuilding them when necessary. Nevertheless, it was a lot of work and I still have many broken links to find and fix because we no longer use any scripts on that site.

Of course, this means that thousands of links on the Internet, especially those pointing to the photos in the photo album are now broken, but there’s nothing I can do about that from my end.

All because somebody decided to invade the site and cause problems.

Sigh.

It’s a real shame that it isn’t easier to be creative and helpful than destructive.

Moving on….