Our Founders

Large, national cable and phone corporations only offered broadband service to the most populated and profitable areas, leaving outlying areas without service. Realizing that there was a real need for high-speed Internet infrastructure and services in rural, northern Vermont and that fixed wireless was the best way to deliver it, 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 founded Cloud Alliance in 2005.

Jake’s Island Pond Wireless (now part of Great Auk Wireless) successfully delivered a fixed 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 for the Northern Community Investment Corporation.

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

Our Manager

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 sixth 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 would not. The services provided by Cloud Alliance, such as CloudBurst fixed wireless broadband, wireless “hotspots,” and other related services are providing rural Vermont with unprecedented business opportunities, while preserving 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 fixed wireless Internet networks.