The LCWA President’s Letter, December 2018

Dear Members,

2018 has been a phenomenal year with a ton of major LCWA accomplishments helping our members. Here at the end of the year, I’d like to review what we’ve accomplished—maybe even gloat a little bit—because I am so proud of our volunteer organization! So read on to see what we’ve been doing.

Dana Simmons,
President LCWA

We Grew Our Membership to over 600 Members. With an increase of 82 households in 2018, we now have over 600 memberships! Remember, our service helps people in rural Santa Fe County connect to the Internet, and most of them wouldn’t have Internet service otherwise. Each new member is greeted by a volunteer going to their house and helping to hook them up, and I personally have met many of these new members. We have a sensational new team!

Credit Card Payments and Portal. This is probably our largest accomplishment for 2018. Many members had been begging for credit card payment capability, and now we have it. This helps people pay automatically. It also helped a number of people get caught up on past payments (vs. disconnection). Plus, with our new portal, you can view all your payments and edit your info to keep us up to date. It took a lot of work to get this in place, most of it from volunteers, so if you see an LCWA volunteer nearby, pat them on the back.

Sonar Network Tracking. This is behind the scenes for most of you, but we implemented a new network status tracking system and it enables our volunteers to track and identify network issues more quickly.

Sonar Membership System. Another behind the scenes capability, we now have a much better and easier way of organizing member information to make sure they are being served well. Volunteers who are assigned to fix things have a one-stop system to refer to.

Lots of New Access Points. Our service works by bouncing signals off rooftop and tower-top radios called access points, and we’ve added a bunch more of those throughout the county. All told, six new or upgraded access points were put in-place this year. It has enabled us to add geographic regions we could not reach, and to improve the connection to many existing ones.
However, the effectiveness of Kamagra oral drug has been tested purchase generic levitra over the years and across all age teams. Afterwards, they visited south India, which included places in states–Kerala, sildenafil india online Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. cialis for sale cheap Practice different techniques together, which can delay the ejaculation time during lovemaking. The following are viagra 25 mg some of the most common sexual problems in men.
Enhanced our 800 Support Line. We’ve added a brief menu choice at the front of our 1-800 support line that makes it much easier to route the service request to the right volunteers.

Network Upgrades throughout the System. We put in backup links for trunk lines that have increased the reliability of the system. We upgraded many of the switches and routers at the access points, which has also increased reliability. Finally, we improved our power backup capabilities at many access points. With all this, you should be seeing fewer outages and greater connection speeds.

Paid off our Loan. During a major equipment upgrade a few years ago, LCWA was assisted by a generous no-interest loan from an enthusiastic member/volunteer. This year we made the final payment on that loan and we are now able to use the freed-up budget for improving the network even more. We are making plans for that already!

Renegotiated our Trunk Line Internet Contract. By renegotiating that contract we accrued big savings—savings that will also be used for improving the network.

Big Thank You to Jerry Zollars. The end of this year Jerry Zollars retired as LCWA Treasurer after 12 years. The long and successful path LCWA has been on is largely due to Jerry’s guidance, volunteer activities, and ceaseless dedication. Thank you, Jerry Zollars!

Started the Monthly President’s Letter. This newsletter you are reading is all about keeping you, the members, in the loop. One goal is sharing stories about our membership and volunteer community. Another goal is explaining our technology in layman’s language so that you can get the most out of the network and your membership (like this article on how to maintain your routers). Let us know if you’d like to see any specific topics and we’ll add them!

What Are Your Priorities for 2019? As a member, let us know what you think we, LCWA, should focus on in 2019—just reply to this email with what changes or improvements you’d like to see.

And Finally, We Gave Away a Computer! We hope to do this each year around the holidays: put together a computer from spare parts and give it to a young person who makes the best case for it. This year Sawyer Headley wrote an excellent proposal for how she and her two grade-school sisters could use it for school work. It was very well written, and it melted our hearts! Plus, her father Rich is a long-time regular volunteer for LCWA and currently volunteers to host one of our access points. See the picture below of the Chrome OS computer being unboxed and turned on for the first time by the sisters.

So that’s our long list of 2018 accomplishments. I hope that 2019 will be just as impressive! Again, let us know what you’d like to see LCWA accomplish in 2019–simply reply to this email.