Blog: 2010-07-23T18:02:48Z Copyright (c) 2010, Admin ExpressionEngine tag:,2010:07:23 tag:,2010:/5.67 2010-07-23T17:01:47Z 2010-07-23T18:02:48Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
We had the vehicle back for just a few days when we started hearing noise from the rear brakes. I’m thinking great, we’re going to be in for another tidy little repair bill. So I take the van back to the shop and politely explain the situation to the manager. He had it looked at and sure enough the rear brakes need the full deal - pads, drums, etc. "Ok, how much" I ask, thinking he’s going to part me from the money I had stashed for new golf clubs. He tells me normally about $400 but since they missed it, and it’s inexcusable, they will do parts and labor for free. Better yet they will do it immediately. Amazing!! I express my surprise and gratitude and inform the manager we will be coming to them for all our future auto repair needs.

Now I don’t know what the margin is on a $400 brake job, but I’m pretty certain he’ll make it all back and then some with our future business and referrals.

We’re all human and making a mistake, is well – human. But what separates one set of humans from another, is the willingness to take responsibility for it. Like any company, Clearfield’s made a mistake or two along the way, but I’ve been proud to see our customers treated like I was at that auto repair shop – with service and a smile. - Gordy Spray ]]> tag:,2010:/5.66 2010-07-22T14:06:13Z 2010-07-22T15:18:14Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
Not that it matters, but I’m in the asteroid camp.

No matter the reason, why did mammals survive? Some scientists say that mammals lived in burrows or in aquatic environments that shielded them from the intense heat (asteroid), others say that there wasn’t enough food for the dinosaurs (climate change, volcano) or that the more generalized tastes of mammals allowed them survive. Most will agree that mammals were generally small and nimble, and very adaptive. Suited to change quickly and adapt to new environments.

100 million years ago the dinosaurs were the undisputed king of beasts, their passing in history allowed the mammals to thrive and take their place on earth.

Well last week a T-Rex ate an Allosuarus in our industry. And I’m thankful to still be working at company that operates like a mammal. - Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.65 2010-07-22T13:48:10Z 2010-07-22T15:13:11Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
Ok, enough. What did this experience make me think of? Those smart forward thinkers in telecom that started their Broadband Stimulus projects ahead of the bubble coming. Some went out and got interim loans or started with their own money to get ahead of the game. The others are going to have to deal with contractors that have more than enough work or hire less than competent workers. Also longer lead times for equipment.

Did I learn anything from my experience today? Yes I did, I have a reservation at the Radisson in Bismarck for tomorrow night; non-smoking, with a Sleep Number bed.

And a deeper appreciation for not waiting until the last minute.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.64 2010-07-09T12:48:42Z 2010-07-09T13:50:43Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
People have asked me what I like best about my job. I’ve always said it’s the people; competent, hard-working professionals with a dedication for our industry. Regular people doing their best work.

But I think the answer to that question goes deeper than that. I’ve been in Telecom for over 3 decades. Most of my co-workers and customers have shared a similar path. Familiar experiences, lessons, and stories; we share a common ground. All the triumphs and tragedies we’ve seen in our work.

That’s the best part of my job. And to have the opportunity to experience that with my daughter is truly heartwarming.

Common Ground and a Common Bond. - Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.63 2010-07-08T13:48:38Z 2010-07-08T15:44:39Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
I love the old school stuff, but…

My daughter called me last night. She was out running errands in her 2008 Toyota Corolla. She said, “There is a yellow exclamation point on my dash”. I said “an exclamation point?” she replied, “ya, and it has parentheses around it”. I had my suspicion, but since she had the car and the owner’s manual, I decided to get on my Blackberry and do a Google search. Sure enough, Low Tire Pressure. That exclamation point with parentheses had a line connecting at the bottom and represented a tire. I called her and told her to look at her tires, but none of them looked low she said. When she returned home, I got my tire pressure gauge out and her right front tire read 30 psi, all the others 37. I took a quick look and sure enough, there was a nail in her tire. I got my tools out and fixed it with a plug, good to go.

My other daughter has a birthday tomorrow and she wanted Apple headphones so I headed to the mall, which by the way is not my favorite place to be. I located the Apple store and the in-ear phones she wanted. I grabbed the package and started looking around for a register to pay for them. A couple of the workers saw that I looked confused, because there was no obvious place to check out. They asked if they could help and I said where do I pay for this? One of the guys walked up and said he could help me. He got out his iPhone, scanned the item, took my credit card, swiped it and asked if I wanted a printed receipt or would an email receipt be ok. I gave him my email address, and within seconds I had an email with receipt on my Blackberry. I’m not much of a shopper, unless you count Home Depot, Fleet Farm, and NAPA, but that experience blew me away. Instant, un-tethered communication, wow!

Our industry provides the pipes for this communication. Those cool Apps on the iPhone, the ability to search the internet from my Blackberry and diagnose an issue with my daughter’s car. They would be worthless without the data pipes. As our appetite for bandwidth grows, those pipes will have to be fiber. Every wireless company has RFPs out on the street for fiber builds to feed their cell sites. Fiber will power the 4G networks of tomorrow and will allow even faster communication for ever more bandwidth hungry applications. I am proud to be a part of this industry.

I still like working on “Old School” vehicles, but I can’t see ever going “Old School” for my communications needs.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.62 2010-07-01T18:42:45Z 2010-07-08T15:45:46Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
Back then life was good, drove a 1971 Ford pickup, a 360 V8 with a supercharger. Gas was 58 cents a gallon and I could burn through a set of rear tires every summer. I’m not going to lie to you; baling hay back then was back-breaking work. 75-100 pound bales, stack on a hay wagon, haul to hay shed, unload and stack again. Hot, dirty work and blistered hands; this was old-school haying. Not like today with the large round bales that get baled, loaded, unloaded and fed all with machinery. Never touched with human hands, no sweat or flesh need be sacrificed. Hell, the tractors are air-conditioned now.

We’ve come a long way. Back then we had an 8 party line at our house. Now I have an Active Ethernet FTTH network serving my house up on the farm. I am reminded every day all that I don’t know, but a couple weeks ago I attended a technical seminar on new technologies on the horizon for FTTH networks. That was much more than a subtle reminder, it was more like a smack in the face. 10 giga-bit GPON, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) with symmetrical 100gb/s (up and downstream) with 100km reach. Are you kidding me, that’s 62 miles! OFDMA allows Spectral overlap without interference. WDM PON with “colorless” ONTs, 8 port OLT cards with OTDR functionality built-in to the card. There are some amazing technologies just around the corner in our industry. Zero water peak fiber opening up the E-Band (Extended Band)(1360-1460nm wavelengths) ONTs that can go to sleep when idle to conserve on energy consumption, all brilliant stuff.

We have come a long way as an industry and it appears we have a long way to go. Thank God we will never get bored.

As I sneak up on the final chapter of my telecom career (33 years behind me, not than many in front), I am amazed every day on far our industry has come. Would I trade my carpel-tunnel for some blisters on my hands? I’m not so sure, but I still do love the smell of those alfalfa fields right after they’ve been cut.

Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.61 2010-06-30T16:25:33Z 2010-07-08T15:46:34Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
That got me thinking; I have nothing much to do BUT think when I’m driving 75,000+ miles per year, ha. Why are they synchronized I thought? I guess it makes sense, rather than having 50 random blinking red lights. This could be confusing to an airline pilot. After I returned home from that trip, I did a little research online; I have nothing much better to do when I get home on the weekend than to get online and do research on red blinking lights, ha just kidding. It seems that the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) and the DOE (Department of Energy) did a study back in 2005 that determined among other things that synchronizing the warning (obstruction) lights on large wind farms was less confusing and therefore safer for potential air traffic.

Besides the fact that most of those wind turbines have fiber connected to them for telemetry and other communication requirements, what has that got to do with our industry? Well, it has everything to do with all industries.

Without a clearly defined strategy, mission or goal, a company will have less chance for success. That vision starts at the top, just like those flashing red lights on top of the wind turbines. If a company is not in sync from the upper management to every worker, it will lead to confusion, inefficiency, and a potential “plane crash”.

There are so many aspects and departments in a company that don’t know what the others do, that can lead to animosity and rivalry between departments. Sales vs. Production, Engineering vs. Sales, Sales vs. Accounting, funny how Sales is always involved.

Are those red flashing lights synchronized at your company?

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.60 2010-06-16T14:20:18Z 2010-07-08T15:47:19Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
I was having a conversation with the General Manager of a Telephone Company in North Dakota. They offer triple-play services over new FTTH networks in four of their exchanges. He told me that a lot of the trouble calls they get from their customers are related to questions and issues with their customer’s equipment, like computers, and televisions.

One particular story was about an elderly lady whose grandson had visited for the day and had hooked up his Playstation to her TV. When her grandson left she couldn’t get her TV to work. The Telephone Company sent one of their technicians out and it was just a simple input source change on the TV that fixed her problem.

It has been and will always be people that make the difference. Patient, competent, caring employees add that Human Element to a corporation no matter what they make, sell, or fix.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.59 2010-06-16T14:01:31Z 2010-07-08T15:48:32Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
Being in the right place at the right time can mean many things in life. If you are reading this you are almost certainly in the Telecom industry. Those of us in this industry are absolutely in the right place at the right time. Our industry is dynamic and healthy, and we are in the midst of a total revolution of the network, migrating from a copper/coax plant to fiber. Fiber to the Home, Ethernet, WDM and soft switches carrying high speed data, video services and cellular traffic.

Thomas Edison once said “Vision without execution is a hallucination”. I love that quip but in my opinion it is incomplete. You have to have the correct vision. I attended a FTTH seminar in Indianapolis this week and heard something that shocked me. Some carriers are looking at setting cost structures for data on how much bandwidth you use. I can see their point, with all the iPhones out there sucking up bandwidth along with customers on their computers downloading video content, music, and internet gaming, it is almost an impossible task to keep the network pipes big enough to keep up with demand. But are we really going to go back to a “measured” service model? I’ve been in this industry long enough to remember the difference between a 1FR and a 1MR, 1MR being a measured residential POTS line.

Ok maybe we will have some carriers try a measured service approach to help offset the cost of the data appetites of Americans. But my vision tells me that it will only be a temporary “phase”. It wasn’t that long ago, although it seems like it was a lifetime, that cellular plans started out that way. Now I see them as the exception and the unlimited minute plans as the rule. Where there is competition, someone will always be there to change the dynamics and try to gain customers by offering a better (unlimited) package. Let’s all work together and keep the fiber revolution advancing. Let’s build a network that will last decades to promote business productivity and growth, information sharing, and entertainment.

Are ya’ll wondering what happened with my car? Well I dodged a bullet; it was my Mass Air Flow Sensor that had got a little dirty which messed with the computer, that whole air – fuel mixture thing. Only cost me $90 and I was back on the road again. Hope I’m good for another 366,000 miles I was truly blessed to have had car trouble in that place at that time. It could have happened anywhere, and I mean anywhere as I drive about 75,000 miles a year. I am equally blessed to work in this industry that has brought me so many good friends, so much knowledge, and has helped me support my family.

Timing is everything and I was reminded of that again in Brighton, Michigan.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.58 2010-04-27T13:13:54Z 2010-07-08T15:49:55Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
There are a couple of odd circumstances that stand out to me in the event. The first is where it is. I’m not sure I would have guessed that I would have FTTH at my farm house, in very rural Minnesota, before my home in a Minneapolis suburb. Secondly, I’ve been in the telecom industry for 32 years and the last 5 of that have been very specific to the FTTH market where I work with engineering consultants on FTTH designs and products.

So now I have the end result, premiere service, from the industry that I have been dedicated to serve for the past 5 years. Very cool!

I always thought of my farm as a sanctuary away from being “connected”. I would rather be working outside, cutting wood for my wood-burning stove or 4 wheeling, snowmobiling, or hunting on the wooded 230 acres. I got by just fine with a single landline and satellite TV, with nothing more than dial-up capability for data. I always thought that would be good enough. But last fall when I found out WCTA was passing me with fiber; I decided to take the triple-play bundle. Give it a try, support my industry. I couldn’t be happier.

3 techs came out and installed the NID in my basement, ran Cat5E to my 2 TV set-top boxes. They configured the wireless router that is integrated in the NID, set up the security, and we were rolling. I got the basic package which includes all the TV channels I wanted, landline, and 5mb/s downstream and 1mb/s upstream data. All for $99/month, free installation and equipment.

The TV picture was clean and crisp, my laptop loved the data speeds, and my phone line worked. Life is good.

Don’t tell my boss, but I may be working from home a little more now, my home in the woods.

I’m on an Active Ethernet network. So when I’m a grandpa, hopefully not for several more years, I can have WCTA crank up my bandwidth and download 3D videos of my grandkids playing basketball. Don’t laugh, it’s going to happen. I’ve joined the club and I am very happy with the membership. I’m one of 6 million homes that are connected with FTTH across our country. There are about 18 million homes passed, not sure what they are waiting for.

5% of American homes have been connected and 17% have been passed. So I’m in the club early.

I guess I better get up out of my chair on the porch, take my laptop and head back to Minneapolis and go to work; or maybe not.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.57 2010-04-06T13:29:41Z 2010-07-08T15:51:43Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
In physics, Newton’s Second Law states: Net force acting upon an object causes acceleration directly proportional to the net force and inversely proportional to the mass.

Guess what, not only are we finally getting movement with Broadband Stimulus, we are getting acceleration. Several BIP and BTOP projects have been successfully awarded from Round 1 and we just completed the Round 2 Application process for many more. The net force is finally greater than the mass. We have a lot of work to do in the next few years. Many engineers I have been meeting with lately question if we can get it all done by the deadlines set by the government.

Does our industry have the horsepower to get it all done on time?

Or more correctly, do we have the torque?

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.56 2010-02-19T16:56:52Z 2010-07-08T15:52:53Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
Anyway, I’ll get to the point. We had a fence made from 4x4 posts and 2x6 rails that ran the full length of the front side of our pasture. It was about 150 yards long with a couple of 90 degree turns. One day I guess I was bored and decided to try to walk on top of that fence. Now for those of you who don’t know, when you buy a 2x6 planed smooth it is really only 1 ½” by 5 ½” so here I am balanced on top of a 1 ½ inch board 4 ½ feet off the ground. Now my dad is a hell of a fence builder, so it was pretty solid, but the span between the posts was a little shaky. This might not be the dumbest thing I ever did, but it was close. When I would lose my balance, I would jump to one side or the other of the fence. I’m sure glad I never slipped and fell straddling that fence. By the end of that summer, with several falls behind me, I could walk on top of that fence the full 150 yards without a dismount.

(Now the real point) I just read that US workers are at an all time high for productivity. Companies are reluctant to hire given our current economy, and that means “job enhancements” for those of us employed. We all take on this added work without complaint and thankful we have a job.

We Americans are not afraid of work and current economic times have us all balancing on a 2x6 between the posts. Try to find that healthy balance between family, work, friends, and leisure that will sustain you for the long-haul. I don’t want you to lose your balance and fall straddling that 2x6.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.55 2010-02-19T16:46:03Z 2010-07-08T15:54:04Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
You have recently seen squabbling between Cablevision and HGTV and the Food Network. Cablevision blacked-out those 2 channels from their 3 million subscribers when contract negotiations broke down. I also recall a few years ago that Comcast and The Big Ten Network couldn't come to terms.

Sea Change is an idiom for a Broad Transformation drawn from a song in Shakespear's "The Tempest".

I don't have to tell you the Sea is Changing.

Newspapers are going bankrupt, cable companies are scrambling, telephone companies are offering video services, customers have choices (DVRs, HULU, AppleTV)...

Why is the way we get our content changing?

One word: Customers

Customers are deciding how and when.

It has always been and will always be: the Customer is King.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2010:/5.52 2010-01-18T18:48:46Z 2010-07-08T15:58:47Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
I've got to believe this is the way many Communication providers feel these days. Is there a wireless carrrier up ahead looking to throw up some antennas on the street lights in my town trying to steal customers? Is that cable company doing node splits, or looking at RFoG or GPON? What new government rules and regulations are on the horizon?

One thing I know for sure, at 70 mph that next hill is coming up fast.

I better put this cigar out and pay attention to the road ahead.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]> tag:,2009:/5.51 2009-11-11T16:41:30Z 2010-07-08T16:03:31Z Admin ryan.mcgrew@sierra-bravo.com
I stopped at a rest stop to calm my nerves and take a five minute break to get the blood flowing back through my white knuckles.

On the way out the door I stopped for a minute to talk with an older gentleman that was mopping up the sloppy mess being tracked into the lobby. He asked, " How are the roads?" "Spots are pretty slick" I shared.

He leaned on his mop and said "It could be tricky, but you'll be OK"

He was right, I made it safely to the end of my day.

The same thing will hold true for us working our way down the Broadband Stimulus highway.

We have many obstacles to overcome in the next few years. Too much work, too little time. Equipment shortages, not enough qualified workers, and our government looking over our shoulder.

In my 32 years of work in our industry, I've met so many smart, hard-working, dedicated, salt-of-the-earth people.

We'll all work together, keep a level head, and get it done. Just like we've done many times before.

It could be tricky, but we'll be OK.

- Jim Pilgrim ]]>