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Recently TMC's (News - Alert) Janice McDuffee had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Rick Peppers, the president of TelPlexus, at the TMC ITEXPO (News - Alert) 2011 in Miami. The company, based just southeast of Nashville, has been around for 13 years, providing engineering services for phone companies, helping with borrowing funds, primarily.

"We also provide our services to long haul carriers, and the full gamut of engineering services, from softswitch to the home," he said. Peppers noted that they used to just go out with a blank sheet of paper, and draw the routes, but now they fly and use existing GIS information for more accurate results.

"It provides an opportunity for us to do a great deal more work at less labor costs," he said. The company is at the expo – for the first time – for "networking opportunities, branching out a little, getting out of our comfort zone and picking up a bit of new business."

In an interview with TMC's Paula Bernier (News - Alert), Peppers said that helping independent telcos as they work to build networks based on those funds continues to be an interesting experience.

While the Murfreesboro, Tenn.-based outside plant design firm helps to smooth the broadband stimulus terrain for its independent telco clients (four of which are broadband stimulus award winners), Peppers explained that some entirely new concerns have cropped up along the way for broadband stimulus fund awardees and their partners.

For example, the broadband stimulus money comes with Davis-Bacon wage requirements. That means that contractors have to pay union scale. However, prevailing wages for jobs like fiber optic splicers are not defined, said Peppers. That means service providers and their contractors are required to define wages for such workers, he says, but that can be a tough proposition, particularly given the fact that once those wage levels are defined the involved companies have to stick with them over the course of the job.