The cover story on the January 2007 issue of Business People Vermont is about Tim Nulty and the crazy-awesome telecommunications network he's building for the city of Burlington. You can read it online here.
I'm not wild about the way the magazine articles are presented online (some special characters don't translate, photo captions interrupt the text, etc.). If you can't suffer through, pick up a copy at a local seller of fine periodicals.
There was so much to write about and such a limited amount of space that I had to leave a bunch of stuff out, like the fact that if you wanted to find a technologically similar network, you'd have to go to Asia. Fiber-to-the-home networks of this caliber don't exist anywhere else in the states yet. Also, the fiber capacity is such that literally every single citizen of Burlington could potentially have their own cable TV channel... or two. It's really amazing and I'm not sure people who live here really get just how awesome it is.
“They had a telecommunications project that was in the ditch, and somebody told them that a Vermonter had moved back to the state who actually knew something about this stuff,” says Nulty. The city asked him to take a look at its faltering project. “The fundamental idea was not bad at all,” he says, “but the execution was a disaster.”
Burlington had lucked into tapping the shoulder of a world-class economist and telecommunications expert. Nulty presented the city with a plan to not only build the most modern, state-of-the-art telecommunications network in the country, but do so without spending a penny of the taxpayers’ money.The first time he thought he was wrapping up his career, the U.S. Department of Energy drafted him into service to help manage the largest environmental cleanup project in the world. When he was finished with that job in 2001, he retired again, only to be called back into government service a couple of months later — this time, by the city of Burlington.