Tag: providers

Tech providers showcase region’s possible

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As a daring approach aims to elevate Grand Rapids’ status as a technologies hub, quite a few companies in the region already highlight the region’s prospective.

In September, the economic development corporation The Ideal Put Inc. shared a vision to expand the tech sector in the increased Grand Rapids region. The method calls for 20,000 new jobs in tech over the up coming ten years, rising the sector to 10% of all regional employment and positioning Grand Rapids as the Midwest’s have Silicon Valley.

For Jennifer Wangler, who serves as vice president of engineering at The Proper Spot and executive director of the Technologies Council of West Michigan, West Michigan has a story to convey to in conditions of tech likely.

“We need to start conversing about all the great points that are happening in West Michigan — all the neat businesses, the terrific leadership that we have here locally, and the electric power of collaboration that comes about in West Michigan that really is one of a kind to our ecosystem,” Wangler told the Small business Journal in September.

Without a doubt, the region’s ecosystem incorporates a wide range of distinctive assignments — like space know-how utilized by NASA that is developed and made in this article in Grand Rapids.

DornerWorks, a community technological know-how engineering expert services agency, has designed a house-qualified sort of Ethernet change permitting astronauts to communicate with their team or send out a message to their family members from house. According to the enterprise, it’s the first technology of its variety in the globe.

“There’s distinct knowledge that this module wants to be ready to sustain or be ready to approach and make confident it fulfills the demands below all disorders,” said Danche Gjorgjievski, senior engineering group supervisor at DornerWorks. “Specifically for NASA, there’s of course quite comprehensive demands that our structure requires to meet up with — power, efficiency, dimension and then creating positive that can operate in a radiation-hardened atmosphere.”

The style and design from DornerWorks is intended to be utilized for NASA’s Artemis II mission presently scheduled for May well 2024. The mission will ship crew members on NASA’s Orion spacecraft in which the neighborhood firm’s technological know-how will be installed.

Even though this technological know-how has been built for NASA to begin with, Gjorgjievski reported it could be used in other applications in the foreseeable future.

“There’s prospective that we would be supporting the next technology as properly,” Gjorgjievski explained.

At the time of publication, NASA had celebrated the new start of the Artemis I moon rocket just after past tries ended up rescheduled or unsuccessful. 

Array of Engineers, a Grand Rapids-based mostly supplier of embedded software improvement, hardware design and other electrical engineering alternatives, also is creating strides in the place field.

The firm was launched in 2018 by Stacy and Howard Paul, who both have encounter in aerospace engineering and have labored at NASA.

“We’re usually passionate about trying to do those people forms of jobs, particularly now

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The startup that wants to disrupt big internet providers

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A new startup backed by funding from AOL founder Steve Case and Laurene Powell Jobs wants to break up broadband monopolies across the country.

Why it matters: Internet access has been crucial during the pandemic, but it’s not ubiquitous, and it can be both slow and unaffordable in swaths of the country.

What’s happening: Underline, a community infrastructure company, began building its first open access fiber network in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last week.

  • Under the open access model, Underline builds and operates the fiber network while multiple service providers can use it and offer service to customers.
  • Residential service will start at $49 per month for a 500 megabits per second connection, with a gigabit connection available for $65 per month. That’s much faster than the 25-Mbps benchmark the Federal Communications Commission uses to define high-speed internet service.
  • Underline chose Colorado Springs for its first project by evaluating several factors, including households that lack internet access, the number of existing providers and how angry customers were with their current internet options, CEO Bob Thompson told Axios.

By the numbers: Underline’s project in Colorado Springs involves more than $100 million in capital to build 400 miles of fiber and offer service to 55,000 residences and businesses.

  • Underline has a list of about 2,500 target cities for service, Thompson said.
  • “We aspire to be the country’s first nationwide open access network,” Thompson said. “The 2,500 communities have been ignored by the incumbents for years on significant infrastructure upgrades. And they generally won’t qualify for the government’s infrastructure bill.”
  • Roughly 83 million Americans have only one choice for a home internet provider, according to a report from anti-monopoly think tank the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

The big picture: The open access model is not new, but it’s been gaining traction recently, especially as the pandemic has forced people to rely more on home internet.

  • California this summer passed a law to spend $6 billion on a state-owned open-access network meant to connect communities across the state to high-speed internet.
  • West Des Moines, Iowa, is planning to build a conduit network with Google Fiber paying the city for access to the network, but the project is facing blowback from the local cable internet provider, Mediacom.
  • Utah’s open access fiber network, UTOPIA, struggled financially in its early days, but the network has become a success story and continues to expand, Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Axios.

What they’re saying: Open access fiber networks, already popular in Europe, could catch on in the U.S. as demand for fiber increases, Falcon said.

  • “Everything needs fiber,” Falcon said. “There’s this unified infrastructure that exists — a medium of transmitting data — it’s fiber optics. If you want to do 5G and satellite, and fiber to the home, you can do all of that with the exact same set of wires.
  • “But the inefficiency that exists right now is everyone’s trying to build their own fiber network.”
  • A new study out Wednesday from
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