NOTE: Special thanks to Tom Eick for providing the following minutes!

Rural Nelson General Meeting
Wednesday, August 4, 2004

Conny Roussos started the meeting by leading the group introductions and
introducing the evening's speaker, Greg Kelly, with Central Virginia
Electric Cooperative.

Mr. Kelly's program, "Broadband over the Powerlines", was an explanation
of Central Virginia Electric Cooperative's initiatives in the realm of
high speed internet service over Cooperative's electric utility lines.
CVEC's efforts in to bring broadband internet service to rural areas is
one of the most progressive in the country and up to 4000 CVEC customers
will be able to participate in the first phase of the pilot program.

The basis of the technology is to inject data to the electric lines and
have it available to electric customers through the wall socket of their
electrical outlets. One of the key components of this data transfer
technology is a regenerator. Mr. Kelley explained that these units,
installed on utility poles, work to compare the data they received with
the data received at the previous regenerator. Any deletions or changes
in the original message are recognized and corrected. This allows the
data transfer to be extended indefinitely. Currently 120 regenerators
have been installed on CVEC's poles covering 45 miles of utility lines.

CVEC has teamed up with IBEC, a broadband internet access company, to
provide high speed internet service to users in rural Virginia. CVEC
will be doing installation of the technology in the energized
environment  due to their expertise in this area. They will also be
doing the billing for this service. IBEC provides the technology and the
operation of the system.

Thirty electric customers on the north circuit of the Colleen substation
are now  hooked up for this service with another 20 subscribed. Any CVEC
customer can go to CVEC's website at www.forcvec.com and subscribe for
this service. Greg Kelly said, however, that he is not even going to
guess when this service will be available to various areas of CVEC's
service area. The technology is new and certain problems will
undoubtably crop up and have to be overcome.

Anyone with internet service can access CVEC's website and get
additional information about this exciting technology as well as the
subscription rate and provided services.

Mr. Kelly said that the main reason that CVEC is moving in this
direction is to improve the quality of its customer's lives. This
technology could allow people to find more employment opportunities in a
rural setting by allowing them to work from their homes on computers and
by giving local businesses greater computer capacity.

The next Rural Nelson meeting will be Wednesday, September 1 at 7:30 pm
at the office. The progrom will be: "The Grand Saga of the Monarch
Butterfly" - Speaker: Dr. Lincoln Brower of Lynchburg College.
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OF INTEREST:

- Saturday, August 28 - 3:00-7:00pm - Cardinal Point Summer Concert
Series Featuring OHMS LAW - Benefiting: Rural Health Outreach Program -
$7/includes wine glass (no charge for those under 12) - Show goes on
rain or shine!
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Kim T. Cash
Field Officer
Rural Nelson, Inc.
P. O. Box 401
(622 Front Street)
Lovingston, VA  22949
434.263.5000
Email: info@ruralnelson.org
www.ruralnelson.org