WiFi – Demand for the WiFi service continues to grow at impressive rates. Installations are going well. Below is a graph showing installs per month as of 02/16/12. February will continue to grow as we progress through the month.

Rural Wireless – We are continuing to work on strategies to increase subscriptions in the rural area. We have identified several high density areas that we have had high levels of interest in. We are working on strategies to deploy localized networks to these areas to make installations easier and improve the quality of the service.

Fiber to the Home – We have received an impressive amount of responses to our FTTH survey in Cascadia and Bornstedt neighborhoods. We did not receive responses from a majority of the residents but we came very close. After discussing our results with the SandyNet Advisory Board they suggested that we look at ways to reduce project costs and determine if we can install a more modest network design. This would allow us to only charge people who are interested in service without requirig a base fee from the non subscribing property owners.

Customer Billings –

IT Department

Virtualization Project – Progress continues on the virtualization project. We now have about a ten users primarily at City Hall that have been migrated to virtual desktops. So far the transitions have been smooth though they are a little more time consuming than I anticipated.

Generator Failure – The last 3 power outages we have experienced in Sandy (over the past year or so) have all resulted in failures of some sort with our generator at City Hall. This is a very big problem for our server and switch equipment as it is not good for the majority of those devices to be abruptly powered off. We do have battery systems in place that can sustain systems for 15 to 20 minutes, but the batteries were only designed to give the generator time to start up.

I have been in contact with an electrician to get some recommendations on fixing this problem. The solution appears to be replacing our current 25 KW generator with a 50 KW generator, or adding an additional 25 KW generator to supplement the current one. I am working on an RFP and solicit proposals for both of these options to determine which is most cost effective.

HVAC Failure – A few weeks ago I had an HVAC company come out to do some “routine” maintenance on our air conditioner for the server room. Unfortunately after they performed some cleaning one of the parts on the AC unit failed and overheated several devices in our data room. Luckily nothing was damaged and we got things repaired. We will be adding a secondary air conditioner to help control the heat in the room and also provide redundancy in the event that we experience another failure.