A Global Corporation with a Rural Address | |
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Tom Palangio has won a global traders award for
the amount of overseas business that he conducts,
that's over 80% of his total business volume.
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A Global Corporation with a Rural AddressBuilding a business from his rural residence, DSL service has allowed Tom Palangio to win a Global Traders Award
From a rural location East of North Bay Ontario, Topex Inc. serves major mining and explosive companies around the world. Thanks to the community networking initiative called NIPNET (Nipissing Network), success hasn't driven Tom Palangio into town.
When Tom retired from a career at Dupont North Bay in 1995 he set up his own consulting company, operating out of his home in Bonfield Ontario. Tom's unique area of expertise was explosives consulting and the use of a software product that his team had developed called WipFrag, that enables him to measure the size distribution of broken rock from images, in order to predict the optimum amount and location of explosive charges required when excavating various types of material.
The better his predictions, the lower the production costs for companies like Inco, Falconbridge, Lafarge and Noranda. In mining and quarrying, when the amount |
From a rural location East of North Bay Ontario, Topex Inc. serves major mining and explosive companies around the world. Thanks to the community networking initiative called NIPNET (Nipissing Network), success hasn't driven Tom Palangio into town.
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and location of the explosive charges are calculated properly, rock breaks up neatly, so as to minimize the expense of pulverizing it into the required particle size. Too much explosive charge and you have unusable rock powder. Too little, and you have added significant expense to the mechanical crushing process.
Needless to say his skills are in demand all over the world and as a spin off to his activities he employs a staff of five at his home location, two additional staff located near Kitchener, and supports another five consulting associates located across North America. In the process of providing blast-consulting services he also promotes technology developed by other Canadian firms such as Instantel and Stroma. Instantel employs 75 staff in Ottawa, where one of their product areas is a line of seismographs, which Tom uses in his work. Stroma located in North Bay develops underground drill pattern design software known as iRing that makes it easier for mine planners to design blast rounds.
This is a remarkable amount of economic activity generated around one person living and working on a rural road in
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Thanks to NIPNET and the DSL service he is
now getting Tom Palangio can still put
together international business deals from his
rural eadquarters in Bonfield Ontario.
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Northern Ontario.
When asked why he chose Bonfield as the location for his business he explained, "When I first started in 1995 it was the logical place to locate. Working out of my home was the economical thing to do. In the beginning the imagery, which I analyzed for my clients, could be delivered to me on CD via courier or I could download it over my dial up Internet line, mostly running the downloads over night."
As time went by the amount of data he had to exchange with his clients went up, as did their expectations. Tom says, "I had clients working out of thatch roofed huts in South Africa who had high speed Internet, at a time when I only had dial up. They couldn't understand how they could have high speed access where they were, and I was in Canada and I couldn't get service."
Tom's ultimate salvation was a community network project funded in part by the Northern Ontario Heritage Foundation, Bell Canada and others. The community initiative provided the funds required to upgrade the copper based services throughout the Nipissing District in order to provide DSL service to hundreds of rural resident's like Tom Palangio.
"If it hadn't been for the Nipnet project getting DSL service to my home office", says Tom, " I would have been forced to move to a larger centre. My essential requirements for servicing my international clients are now: reasonable access to an airport; and high speed Internet service. Once I have that, doing business out of Bonfield is every bit as effective for me as working from downtown Toronto."
Tom Palangio's story illustrates the reality that thousands of Canada's rural businesses face. High-speed Internet is now as much a requirement for the operation of a modern business, as owning a fax machine, perhaps more. Thanks to Nipnet and the investors behind it, Tom Palangio's rural business has experienced a happy transition. Many many other rural Canadian businesses have not been so fortunate and are now struggling to remain viable in a world where bandwidth is becoming the lifeblood of commerce.
See the Topex web site at: http://www.topex.on.ca
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