Category Archives: News

News

Mears Cautions Fiber Hopefuls to Engage Construction Firms Early

Published on by

Mears Broadband is a division of Mears Group, a subsidiary of Quanta Services that provides construction services for fiber broadband deployment projects. Mears Broadband President Trent Edwards says the construction costs for a fiber deployment will account for about 70% of the total deployment cost.

He said that percentage has been historically true and continues to be accurate as scores of companies gear up for Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) funds that will support new fiber projects across the U.S.

Asked if many newcomers to the fiber broadband space are aware of the 70% cost, Edwards said, “not really.”

He also warns that it’s really important to engage with construction companies such as Mears early to ensure that projects stay on schedule and on budget.

[…]

Edwards said there are a lot of people getting involved in this “Great Build” that is about to take place that have never historically been involved in building broadband networks. Among the novices, he includes many of the folks who have only recently been placed in roles at state broadband offices, along with the small staffs at local permitting offices who may not realize what’s about to hit them.

The biggest reason many areas in the U.S. remain unserved or underserved by broadband until now is because private companies couldn’t make a business case to reach these areas. And even though BEAD funds will help subsidize that business case and private equity companies also want to invest, companies will still want to crunch all the numbers to make sure they get a decent return on their investments.

Read more at Fierce Telecom

News

Addressing The Power Issue With Mears Advanced Technology Group

Published on by

Sustainability. If you are in IT—either as an IT executive or as a solutions provider selling into IT—this is a term you are learning to embrace. ESG has become a major focus for virtually every enterprise, meaning that major contributors to ESG efforts (like, ahem, IT) are being measured on how well they are aiding a company’s sustainability efforts—in this case, the reduction of organization-wide power consumption. If your organization hasn’t yet jumped on the ESG bandwagon, get ready. Whether through free will or regulation, an ESG initiative is coming your way.

In this post, I’ll discuss the challenges I’ve been hearing about from IT executives across many industries, and spotlight an interesting solution I recently had the chance to preview.

Do more with less power

For many businesses, IT is a unit that contributes significantly to overall power consumption—and one that’s being tasked with reducing that power footprint. IBM recently conducted a study that showed that datacenters consume about 1% of the world’s power—about as much as the entire power consumption of Australia. The country. In the not-too-distant future, that number is projected to climb to 3%.

Seemingly at odds with sustainability initiatives are the digital transformation projects and edge computing expansions that IT executives are also tasked with implementing. They’re told to employ a cloud operating model and deploy micro datacenters everywhere along the edge so more data can be gathered—data that will be fed into machine learning models so the business can be more innovative and agile. But they must also do so while reducing power consumption by a significant amount. Makes perfect sense, no?

This scenario of contradicting initiatives is what IT executives face every day, leaving many of them scratching their heads and wondering if they are being set up for failure. For those not in IT, it’s important to understand that while power has always been a consideration, it has not always been treated as such a precious commodity to conserve.

 

It’s also about density

While sustainability is a big deal, there is another challenge that IT executives face, especially as they look to the edge: compute density. 174ZB of data—that’s zettabytes—will be generated in 2025, with well over half of the average company’s data being generated at the edge. This mass of data must be aggregated, transformed and analyzed in real time. And for this scenario to work, edge environments will require more than a couple of tower servers with some hard drives and a gateway. The edge requires rich compute platforms that use many high-end CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators. More than that, these servers are deployed in some of the harshest conditions—on oil rigs, at the base of cellular towers, on the battlefield and so on.

Edge computing is the next frontier for IT; Its power, space and ruggedization barriers will continue to stall many IT projects. If only there were a way to cram a lot of compute into a small package that can also provide the necessary power and cooling. If only.

The answer is two-phase immersion cooling

While those in the datacenter space have been experimenting with various cooling techniques over the years, I think there may be a solution to all the challenges of edge computing described above—power, cooling, space, compute density, ruggedization: two-phase immersion cooling.

Two-phase immersion cooling houses servers in tanks filled with dielectric fluid. That’s right, servers run while they are immersed in fluid. And, yes, it defies conventional thinking. It works because the dielectric fluid removes heat from the server and its components, while not interfering with the server’s functionality. The result is that the fluid turns into a vapor and rises. As the vapor rises, cooling coils turn it back into a fluid, which then returns to a reservoir so the cycle can continue over and over again.

The power savings associated with two-phase cooling seems almost too good to be true. Estimates from Mears Advanced Technology Group (MATG) put two-phase power savings in the 60% range, with overall TCO savings of up to 50%. These are staggering numbers.

Read more at Forbes

News

Strengthening the Broadband Labor Workforce

Published on by

An influx of government and private money dedicated to broadband is enabling service providers to set ambitious plans to upgrade networks. But many providers are discovering that the critical challenge in this endeavor is building a strong broadband labor pool.

Telco and cable operator workers hired in the 1990s – when many providers last did major network expansions – have retired or will soon retire, taking with them the knowledge and skills required to transform the networks to fiber to the home (FTTH) and DOCSIS 4.0.

Bob Murphy, senior vice president of business services at ATX, says the emphasis on crews for the communications industry has hit a “20-year lull.”

“There was not a dedicated focus on training the workforce,” he says. “It shifted to an IT-centric workforce instead of pure outside- or inside-plant technicians or line workers.”

Even though the U.S. telecom industry will create 850,000 jobs by 2025 according to a coalition of industry associations, Mears, a construction and engineering services firm, sees the lack of a skilled workforce as a potential issue. “There’s going to be a huge demand for the specialized construction that will take place,” says Trent Edwards, president of Mears.

Read more at Broadband Communities Magazine

News

Vivek Arora Builds Careers to Build Communities

Published on by
Vivek Arora, executive vice president and chief administrative officer

It’s a sunny day in La Grange, Texas, and the sky overhead is clear and blue. We’re at a tranquil piece of land alongside the Colorado River, and although it’s known as the Lazy Q Ranch, today’s guests are hard at work. There are 20 Mears Group employees going through an inventive leadership academy to develop management skills and take their careers to the next level.

Over two separate one-week periods, participants will receive high-level training on business fundamentals, financial management, customer service, communication, and leadership before competing in teams to bid for a mock project.

Vivek Arora and his colleagues created the program to develop future leaders from within. “Our leadership academy is like a mini-MBA but done in the context of our organization,” explains Arora, who is the executive vice president, chief administrative officer, and general counsel. “We’re using it to help people thrive where they are and to see where they can go next.”

Investing in these meaningful workforce development programs is one way Mears can strengthen the company from the inside, and they are a natural fit for Arora, who completed his own MBA at Rice University and graduated from Columbia Law School. He joined Mears’ parent company Quanta Services Inc. as a labor and employment attorney in 2010.

Previously, Arora worked in a large DC-area firm’s labor and employment practice. Now at Mears, he is responsible for several administrative functions that impact 6,500 employees across 9 business units.

Mears brings energy infrastructure engineering, construction, and maintenance services to customers in a wide variety of industries. Doing so requires modern equipment, specialized services, and skilled workers. But project volumes are high and workers are scarce. Robust workforce development initiatives are critical because they enable Mears to attract and retain employees in a competitive landscape.

“The old industry model of recruiting our current employees’ friends and family just won’t cut it in this modern era where projects are bigger and more complex,” Arora says. “We have to develop talent from within and find alternative sources for recruiting and retention so we can build our own competitive advantage.”

Read more at American Builders Quarterly

News

2021 Trenchless Technology Project of the Year New Installation Winner

Published on by

The project honored as the 2021 Trenchless Technology Project of the Year for New Installation is one that successfully applied horizontal direction drilling (HDD) to place underground a critical pair of 12,200-ft parallel power cables under the Rappahannock River near White Stone, Virginia – a hot topic and the type of crossing that is recently making national headlines.

Undergrounding telecom/power lines has been a part of HDD’s repertoire for many years but a national spotlight was shown on this particular type of application in August with PG&E’s announcement that it plans to underground 10,000 miles of power lines in northern California. This year’s winning New Installation project was selected prior to this news.

Traditionally, power lines are installed overhead, but this option leaves them vulnerable in times of severe weather and other events such as wildfires — costing owners even more money and time to replace and/or repair. HDD piques owners’ interest as a long-term protection for their investment when looking at environmental, aesthetic and cost factors.

The Greys Point to Rappahannock Station-Rappahannock River Crossing provides a great example of how HDD is utilized in undergrounding power lines. This project installed two parallel power and cable lines, replacing an overhead 115kV line, giving Dominion Energy Virginia (DEV) customers more capacity, as well as protection from potentially future downed lines.

This project was incredibly challenging for the contractor and its engineers designing it, with several issues requiring tremendous planning and teamwork to overcome. These issues included logistical planning, working during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, creating a design that would be least disruptive to the waterway, resulting in the successful undergrounding of the lines; the project also included intricate overboarding and post lay burial of intermediary tie-in sections using a unique jetting machine to maintain the depth of the new lines 10 ft below the river’s bottom without the use of any mechanical dredging.

The project featured the Engineer, Procure and Construct (EPC) delivery process, which requires critical planning and communication to put together a design to install the two 8-in. steel pipe cables, with two fiber-optic cables tethered to each.

“It’s truly an honor for this project to be selected recipient of this year’s Project of the Year,” says JB Brown, Mears senior vice president and project director for this project. “This could not have happened without a lot of dedicated people working together…It’s great to know the industry sees and recognizes what we are doing.”

Read more at Trenchless Technology

News

People, Service Drive Mears’ Continued Success

Published on by

The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the Mears Group.

Founded in 1970, Mears today is an industry-leading energy infrastructure solutions provider serving multiple markets that include gas distribution, pipeline and facilities construction, pipeline integrity, horizontal direction drilling (HDD) and Direct Pipe (DP) installations. Mears is also active in the electric transmission and distribution, telecommunications, and water and sewer markets.

As it has for 50 years, Mears’ headquarters remains in the small town of Rosebush, Mich., but it now has locations in 24 other states.

Beginnings

In 1969, Herb Fluharty was a project engineer for Underwriters’ Laboratories (UL) in Chicago.

“I had grown up working on pipeline construction for the company my father founded, Welded Construction,” said Fluharty.

Although he was then employed at a large organization, Fluharty recognized and appreciated the challenges of owning a small business. When his father passed away, Fluharty wanted to move back to Rosebush to be closer to his mother and family.

About the same time, a friend started a land surveying and civil engineering business. “He encouraged me to go in that direction,” said Fluharty.

In June 1970, Fluharty, his wife, Chris, and three young children returned to Rosebush where he started a small surveying business. By 1974, the company was serving pipeline clients in central Michigan, and the scope of its services expanded to include machinery, engineering, accounting, repairs and sales.

In 1975 the company was renamed Mears – an acronym using the first letter of each word in its list of provided services – Engineering. It started, and remains, as a family matter, Fluharty owned and operated, and with an extended Mears “family.”

“Remember,” Fluharty said, “we come from Rosebush, Mich., a town of 300; we were family. I had my son, Scot, and nephew, John, who came alongside me early on and have always been essential to Mears’ success. Some would say: ‘Herb could get in the door; John could convince the customer we can do the job; and Scot was left to get it done and make some money doing it.”

Somehow the feeling of “family” has been retained as the company has grown to more than 5,000 employees. It’s clear they are all proud of their company and enjoy working there.

“I believe it stems from respecting and appreciating people as individuals blessed with differing gifts,” Fluharty observed. “I grew up on the pipeline and was exposed to many folks with various talents.

“My father, who was a welder himself, taught us respect for those who did the work. He told me often, ‘Remember, these are the people who really make us our living.’ That, along with, ‘You don’t have to know everything, just bring together those that do,’ has always stuck with me.

“I believe Mears has been blessed with incredible talent, leadership that recognized that, and allows people to do what they are good at.”

Read more at Underground Construction

News

Rosebush company works to ‘adopt’ families for the holidays

Published on by

What started as a set of unused funds has grown into something much larger at an Isabella County business.

Mears Group Inc. — a fortune-500 company in Rosebush — has had a contributions committee for many years.

In 2012, the five-person committee realized it had un-allocated funds at the end of the year and decided to use that money to help a family in need.

Gary Lynch, program coordinator of the contributions committee, said the group contacted six local schools to see if there was a family that particularly needed help. After that, the group decided to make it a yearly tradition and the Mears Christmas Adopt A-Family program was born.

The program is funded by Mears employees as well as Mears groups. The employees support two luncheons each year and all of the money raised goes to the program.

Lynch said the group “loves” to help others and is lucky to do so.

“Next to family and friends, the next best thing I love about life is helping other people,” he said. “I’m very lucky I work with many people that have the same feeling about helping people.”

In 2013, Mears provided six families with household items and non-perishable food. The schools they worked with included Mt. Pleasant, Rosebush, Clare, Beal City, Harrison, Coleman and Shepherd.

In 2014, the company adopted 15 families from 10 different schools. The additional schools were Farwell, Vestaburg, Montabella and Chippewa Hills.

A year later, the group’s budget increased to $11,000 after two “successful” luncheons. The money allowed them to adopt 22 families in 2015.

Lynch said 2016 has been a “great success” and Mears’ yearly budget is now at $12,400 — which allowed them to adopt 25 families this holiday season.

Mears provides supplies such as soap, towels and wash cloths. They also try and provide a family game or two and one or two toys for each of the children.

To date, Lynch said Mears has donated $16,000 worth of items and has had a total of $39,400 in funding. Lynch said he thinks the program will continue to grow and help more and more families over the years.

“I anticipate that the program will grow at a fairly rapid pace,” he said. “My goal is that we will add a minimum of five families per year for many years to come. This is very exciting.”

If you would like to volunteer, contact Lynch at 847-909-9912 or [email protected]. To make a donation, contact Mary Avery at 989-433-5100 or [email protected]