CDI project featured in Arkansas Business Journal

CDI project featured in Arkansas Business Journal

CDI was recently featured in an article in the Arkansas Business Journal, a weekly publication covering Arkansas' industry and business, regarding our current work on the Arkansas Research and Education Optical Network (ARE-ON) fiber installation project.   The publicity on the CDI ARE-ON team is well deserved; their dedication to the project has facilitated smooth installations of cable and fiber huts in locations throughout the state. 

The CDI team members invovled in the ARE-ON project are:

• Jeff Borgsmiller
• Andy Blush
• Tommy Re
• Daniel Bowen
• John Teeter
• Willam Shelton
• Dowen (Deon) Green
• David McElrath
• Cliff Garrison
• Jack Woods
• Sean Smith
• Bruce Geiser
• Ralph Livingston, CDI Corporate Safety Director, who ensures all our job sites are safe and OSHA compliant

We are proud of our ARE-ON team!  Pictured above is William Shelton, CDI Contractors, and Mary Smith, Klaasmeyer Construction, at the UAMS site installation.  The Arkansas Business Journal article follows in its entirety.

CDI Contributes to $128 Million Project

By Luke Jones
12/5/2011
© 2011 Arkansas Business Publishing Group
Link to article

CDI Contractors LLC of Little Rock is building a data network between state colleges and health care systems.

The project began in August 2010 when the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences received a $102 million federal stimulus grant for broadband networks. UAMS matched $26.2 million and brought in the Arkansas Research & Education Optical Network (ARE-ON), an economic development initiative owned by state higher education institutions, to manage fiber construction.

The job was divided between connecting 400 new hospitals and 22 new education centers to the network. CDI, a veteran in installing underground cable, was hired for the education portion, a $7.7 million job.

"About three years ago, we were hired to build the original ARE-ON network," said Jeff Brogsmiller, director of pre-construction services for CDI. "We've been calling it 'phase one.'"

Phase one, Brogsmiller said, connected most of the state's four-year universities to a single network.

"It was a high-speed network to share data and collaborate for education and research on a much higher platform than you'd get through traditional, commercial Internet access," he said.

The current project (informally, "phase two") connects 22 two-year community colleges to the original network. That project broke ground in July, Brogsmiller said. It's now about 35 percent done and is due for completion by Jan. 31, 2013.

"But we'll probably be done before that," he said.

A Big Job

Mark Beach, CDI's chief operating officer, said CDI's portion of the job comprises about 50 miles of new cable.

Fifty miles doesn't sound like much compared to the network's combined total of 5,600, which includes existing lines - but the devil is in the details.

"While this project is probably the most visually unglamorous project I've ever been involved with, it might be the most logistically challenging I've ever been involved with," Brogsmiller said.

The work mostly involves drilling cables underneath counties and municipalities across the state, as well as installing fiber huts over the routes.

"They're prefabricated buildings," Brogsmiller said. "They're fairly small, but they house millions and millions of dollars worth of fiber optic equipment. They have to be temperature controlled to the nth degree and security monitored to the nth degree."

More challenges come from managing material suppliers, obtaining permits and crossing the properties of railroads and landowners.

"The logistics, the program management is the most challenging," Brogsmiller said. "It's a spiderweb of a project. There are a lot of plates spinning at the same time, and you can't let any of them fall down and break."
 
An Important Job

The purpose of CDI's portion of the project is to aid research speed and effectiveness, and it ties into the grant by linking health care with education networks.

"The whole grant has an integrated approach in its ability to share statistical and research information with smaller, outlying schools," Beach said. He said ARE-ON chose CDI because of its experience in installing cables.

"We've done it before; we're doing it again," he said. "We're helping organize the work, getting all the resources and materials, getting the resources deployed and monitoring progress day in and day out. It's a boots on the ground business."

Beach said the overall result would deeply augment Arkansas' health care system, especially in rural areas with limited facilities.

"In the larger scheme of things, some of the biggest benefits for Arkansans is the deployment of a sophisticated and robust health network," he said. "All 75 counties in the state will have at least one anchor point with access to the tele-health network."