Large, national cable and phone corporations offer broadband service only to the most populated and profitable areas, leaving outlying areas without service. In 2005, the founders of Cloud Alliance—Jake Marsh, President and founder of Island Pond Wireless, Tom Joyce, a telecommunications consultant, and Joe Allen, President and founder of Power Shift Online Services—realized that there was a real need for wireless, high-speed Internet infrastructure and services in rural, northern Vermont and New Hampshire.

Jake’s Island Pond Wireless (now part of Great Auk Wireless) successfully delivered a local, wireless Internet system in Island Pond, Vermont and expanded it to multiple communities in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Jake left Cloud Alliance to pursue work on several other wireless endeavors in Vermont before his untimely death in early 2010.

Tom, of Barnet, Vermont is also no longer actively with the company. He is currently managing a project to bring high-speed access throughout a six county region of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom and northern New Hampshire.

Joe’s Power Shift Online Services is a well-respected web-hosting service and dial-up Internet service provider, based in Stowe, Vermont. Power Shift provides Cloud Alliance with customer support, billing, and email services.

Michael Birnbaum, of Plainfield, Vermont, was a spokesperson for a community-based committee, which was the first of several in Central Vermont to select Cloud Alliance as “Provider of Choice.” With Jake, Tom, and Joe, he saw the need for local management of the project. Now in his third year as Cloud Alliance’s General Manager, Michael is devoted to maximizing deployment to the homes and businesses of the region. He works closely with Joe and the other four members of the company, all of whom are from Central Vermont.

We think of ourselves as the “Dirt Road Wireless” company. We have been quietly building a rural, wireless, high-speed Internet infrastructure where large corporations will not. The services provided by Cloud Alliance, such as Cloudburst wireless Internet access, wireless “hotspots,” and other related services will provide rural Vermont with unprecedented business opportunities, yet also help preserve the beauty of the rural landscape we love so much. Won’t you join us? You can sign up to be notified when service becomes available in your area.

About our Name

In diagrams of computer networks, the Internet is depicted by a cloud icon. The source of bandwidth is popularly referred throughout the Internet and telecommunications industry as “coming from the cloud.” Cloud Alliance symbolizes the alliance of community-based wireless Internet networks.