Bucolic Barrington Hills hotbed of technology

By Madhu Krishnamurthy

Mark Welsh, Staff Photographer

Nestled among rolling hills, massive horse farms, 5-acre minimum lot homes and thousands of acres of forest preserve, Barrington Hills remains unadulterated by suburban sprawl.

Straddling roughly 29 square miles over four counties — Cook, Kane, Lake and McHenry — the village has little more than 3,900 residents, lots of trees and open space.

But along with the benefits of living in a quintessential rural setting comes spotty cellular phone service and dropped Internet connections.

Plans in the works could solve those problems, which have some residents concerned about emergency response time and other safety issues.

“There’s a lot of people that rely on their cell phone and when you dial 9-1-1 the Barrington Hills Police Department can tell where you are at physically in town, provided your call gets through,” said Pat Hennelly, who has lived in town 20 years. “There are sections in my house where, if I fall over with a stroke, I couldn’t get connected to the 9-1-1 service.”

Connectivity issues are affecting the safety of residents, Hennelly’s wife, Nancy, chimed in.

“I do a lot of horseback riding and when I would ride in the forest preserve I would see people that had fallen off their horses and I couldn’t get a connection to call 9-1-1,” she said.

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About Mark Milliman

Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
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