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Electronic village of Abingdon “91st Day”
Subcommittee MINUTES 29 September, 1999
12:30 PM The
scheduled meeting of the Electronic Village of Abingdon “91st Day”
Subcommittee held in the Johnston Memorial Hospital Cafeteria was opened by. There were 13 participants present. These included:
The
minutes of the 25 August 1999 meeting were approved as presented with the
addition of Ray Millsap as being in attendance. The
next item for review was the status of new connections, including:
The first agenda item was that of a discussion of an article from the
9/26/99 edition of the Bristol Herald-Courier Newspaper concerning the
extension of fiber optic lines by Bristol Virginia Utilities Board to serve
" . . phone, Web and cable TV services". According to the article; "The
fiber optic line will run 14 miles, from . . . [Bristol]'s Shelby Street
electrical substation downtown, through town and up Lee Highway into
Washington County." Jay Cox explained that NetAccess was very close to reaching
an agreement with BVUB to make an extension of that single mode fiber system
into Abingdon, thereby linking EVA and Bristol.
NetAccess will be operating the system for BVUB; hence, the need to
connect to the Abingdon office. The
resulting link will interconnect offices such as PennStuart that have both
Abingdon and Bristol locations. After
some discussions, it was determined that the proposed Bristol-Abingdon link
could afford EVA some opportunities for westward expansion after agreement
with NetAccess on the use of the fiber that they are installing.
Jay Cox reiterated his prior discussions about teleconferencing and how
to get a demonstration project going. NetAccess
would be willing to invest $5,000 if other entities such as the Town,
Washington County, and others could finance the balance of the cost to do it. Eric Schuler and Mathew Matt will
begin an operations plan, considering features and benefits for the group.
The next agenda item was further discussion of the network map. Al Bradley noted that the beginnings
of such a map had already evolved using the Town's GIS system. Matt Matt and David Taverner had spent
a part of the morning mapping some finer points such as the splice cases and
manners of individual connections which would be added to the map.
Matt Matt presented for the Website Committee an outline of the layout
of the proposed revisions to the EVA home page at http://www.eva.org for the review of those
present. From the revised home
page, there were five main subheadings including "What is EVA?",
"EVA Committee", "Commerce", "Community", and
"Events". Each of these
five subheading were further broken down into other topics of interest
including the EVA Mission Statement, maps, meeting minutes, list of members
and subcommittees, business listings, 'white page' listings, a form for
questions or other input, list of current events and a form for submitting
current events. The suggested
outline of improvements was agreed to by those present. There
being no further business, the meeting adjourned at 1:55 PM.
Respectfully Submitted,
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Albert C. Bradley,
Secretary | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||