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 New England Wireless Company) successfully delivered a fixed-wireless Internet system 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, past of Barnet, Vermont is no longer actively with the company. He managed 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. Tom retired to Arizona.

Joe’s Power Shift Online Services was a well-respected broadband provider and is now a web design and hosting service, based in Stowe, Vermont.

Our Manager

Michael Birnbaum, of Plainfield, Vermont, was a spokesperson for a community committee, whose search for an Internet provider gave rise to the birth of Cloud Alliance. The committee was the first of several in central Vermont to select Cloud Alliance as “Provider of Choice.” A year later, seeing Jake, Tom, and Joe also busy with other work, Michael offered to provide more local management of the project. Now in his ninteenth year as Cloud Alliance’s general manager, he’s devoted to maximizing deployment to the homes and businesses of the region.

Our Principal Technician

Geoff Shadroui, of East Montpelier, Vermont, a long-time local technical repair entrepreneur, is far more than a technician. He also assists Michael with planning and trouble-shooting the network design and operations. Geoff is involved with most of the installations and repair of equipment at both tower and end-user locations. Along with Michael, he’s the “face” of Cloud Alliance at many homes and businesses. Geoff was an active partner of the company for over ten years, before deciding to sell his interest.

Your “Dirt Road Wireless” Company

We’ve 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.” More recently, any data services originating off premises, such as music, information, or video storage, is known as cloud-based. Cloud Alliance symbolizes the alliance of community-based fixed wireless Internet networks.