Next week’s Rural Telecom Industry Meeting and Expo is significant, particularly if the expected NTCA/OPASTCO unification is approved by their respective members. Although unification points to an end of an era, another era will be ending with the retirement of John Rose, president of OPASTCO. Rose has done as much as anyone to unite the rural telecom industry and push it forward.

We were lucky to catch up with John and memorialize his thoughts in a series of interviews starting in 2006. In these interviews, he talked about various industry issues. Roger Bindl compiled these interviews into the above 30+ minute playlist, which provides a bit of a visual and verbal history of a half-decade of significant technology change and its impact on rural America.

In my favorite interview, John had fashioned a block diagram that became central to the interview. It depicted the network he and his son-in-law assembled to deliver over-the-top and off-the-air video to his future retirement home. He had multiple motivations for creating this home-brew, whole home headend and network, but one of the primary reasons was to lead by example and inspire his industry to look for new value-add services to technology-overloaded consumers.

John’s leadership will be missed and we are sorry we didn’t get a chance to interview him one final time at next week’s joint NTCA/OPASTCO Rural Telecom Industry Meeting and Expo. Still, we hope to catch up with him at some point and learn about some of the fascinating history projects he is sure to be working on post-OPASTCO.