I mentioned the other day, both here and over at Frank's that I would put together a history of how the FTTH project has come about in Rossland and my connection to that project. To do that I will go back to my start in "telecom" and go forward from there, as it is all connected. It's rather long so if you're interested read on otherwise....
In 1992 my first marriage ended suddenly and as part of my recovery from that I went out and bought my first computer ( a Packard Hell Bell 386SX16 with a 28MB drive and 4MBRAM). I then bought a 2400bps (yes for you younguns that is 2,400 bits per second) modem and connected to one of the biggest BBS in Vancouver at that time Deep Cove BBS. I was hooked from day one on this whole new way of communicating with people and made a lot of friends in FidoNet one of whom convinced me I should start my own BBS (The Last Enchantment BBS) which I did in the fall of 1992. I operated a FidoNet node and was a regional oordinator (RC) for PODSnet here in BC with about a dozen nodes taking there feed from me, both networks sadly are mere shadows of their former selves. These networks used a distributed star topology and did not operate in real time, like the Internet does, but instead each BBS would package their mail and then dial out to their uplink who in turn would gather all the mail from his downlinks and send them to the regional coordinator. The RC would in turn bundle all the mail and send it on to the the main hub for that network. In this manner netmail (different than email) could go anywhere in the world there was a BBS operating that had a node number on that network but it might take a few days to get there. My system used to call Texas every morning to pick up the PODSnet mail and then it would take that packet and break it out for my downlinks and wait for them to dial in and pick it up. All very interesting stuff, to me. I was bitten by the communications bug.
By 1995 I was on the Internet and had shut my BBS down at the insistence of my second spouse as it was eating up all my time. In 1997 we moved from Vancouver to Rossland and that's when I got the opportunity to get involved at a deeper level. My ex sat on the Trail Chamber of Commerce board and it was there she met Brian Fry who at the time was the VP of one of BC's largest Internet providers WKPowerLink (10,000 customers serving 300 rural communities spread across the interior of the province). Brian was looking for someone to manage his support department and my ex suggested me. One quick interview later and I had the job from hell :-), but I learned a lot about networking in this job. Eventually, in 1999, WKPowerlInk was bought out by Internet Direct, at that time Canada's largest independent ISP and Brian and I had to find something new to do. This is where it begins to get more relevant.
At that time Brian was sitting on the board of KAST, an organization for promoting science and technology projects in the West Kootenay & Boundary region and headquartered in Rossland. KAST organized a conference called Telecom '97 and invited the local cable companies and telco to attend and tell us when we would get better than dialup in the major centers and dialup in the lesser centers, and to explain when they were going to lower the costs of advanced circuit switched connections, such as T1s, to allow businesses here to be competitive with their big city counterparts. The response from BC Tel (now Telus) at the time was less than acceptable. When it became apparent that we were not going to get what we needed from Telus KAST decided to commission a study of the telecom infrastructure in the Kootenay Boundary region. The task of writing that study fell to Brian and myself. At the same time Brian was forming his next company, IPWorld Communications, a fiber optic networking company, so I became the principle author and researcher for that study. I then went on to author studies for IPWorldcom as well as research and write their business plans (we were working on a joint venture with UtiliCorp (now Aquila) to lay fiber optic cables throughout their extensive network of poles in BC then the US).
There was a lot of fallout from that report and all of it good from our point of view. One of our primary recommendations was for KAST to form an ad hoc working group to pursue alternatives to the services we currently had. That formation of that group the Kootenay Boundary Communications Network (KBCN), a collection of networking people and community leaders sent shivers down the backbone of Telus and Shaw Cable. They consulted heavily with both Brian and myself. When the KBCN hired IPWorldcom, to manage an RFI process to get information from a wide range of providers and technology companies on how the region could go forward in telecom and become bleeding edge rather than tailing edge you could hear the screams coming from Telus. Well at least I could as I was managing the process and they were calling me to rant and rave, saying we couldn't do this, making vague political threats etc. All quite interesting :-). About this time the KBCN received some serious funding from the Columbia Basin Trust and transformed itself into the Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON) a legally constituted non profit organization whose goal is to bring advanced, community owned, open access networks to the entire 80,000sq. km Columbia Basin.
. The RFI provided CMON with a tremendous amount of technology solutions information to digest. To help do that they hired IPWorldCom to put together a preliminary business case for providing better than 1.5Mbps communications to all 144 communities in the Basin. Most of that responsibility fell on to me to produce. It was a massive report which unfortunately is still confidential so I can't show it to you.
The result of all this activity? Well Telus and Shaw Cable both announced they would bring their lackluster broadband efforts, DSL and Cable, to the 12 largest communities in the Basin. Of course their reason for doing so was to try and cut the rug out from under CMON but it didn't work. By this time KAST's next venture Telecom 2000 had come and gone and the failure of the telcos and cablecos to "get it" was apparent to all. Both Brian and myself had been giving presentations based on our studies to local city councils throughout the West Kootenay region and Brian had been giving presentations at the telecom conferences. No one was fooled by Telus' and Shaw's tactics, we all knew that the remaining communities would never see any of their "broadband" services. Additionally CMON had started approaching various city councils looking for support and back in 2002 we had them come to Rossland to talk to council. Unfortunately at that time we had a council that was not technology savvy particularly a mayor who took pride in his not ever using or owning a computer.
Enter Industry Canada's Broadband for Rural and Northern Development initiative. BRAND defined broadband as a minimum of 1.5Mbps duplex (same speed in both directions) something that ADSL can not provide (there are flavours of DSL that can but they are even more range limited than ADSL) and Cable Internet would be hard pressed to. The BRAND project provides matching funds for rural communities to enhance their telecom infrastructure to produce the desired results. Now theoretically these communities were suppose to work with the existing infrastructure providers to achieve these results. I'm certain those providers thought of this as a government pork barrel to funnel funds outrageous amounts of funds to them for the least amount of deliverable results. As an example, Telus has excess fiber to almost every community in BC but if you want to access that fiber the very first thing they will hit you with is a $250,000 bill for installing an ATM switch. Now this might be OK (assuming you want to run things over ATM) but you still don't have ownership of the switch (Telus retains that and the right to use it for their own services) so you are subsidizing their business while paying the full cost of the switch. I also don't doubt that the government bureaucrats that put this plan together led the incumbents to believe this as well. However there are subversive bureaucrats at work here. They knew that for communities they were opening up some interesting possibilities for alternative arrangements.
Enter CMON. CMON applied for and received a lot of BRAND grants for the Basin and used that money and their contacts within the province's IT department along with a new provincial government who had made rural connectivity part of their election platform to put huge pressure on Telus that, currently, has the data transport and of phone service contracts for the provincial government. This led to CMON's contract with School District 20. CMON has contracted with SD20 and the provincial government's IT department to run fiber to every school in SD20 as well as every government office. It will be dark fiber, the province will light it themselves, but there will be a lot of dark fiber left over for CMON to use for their own purposes. Telus was forced (remember those contracts) to give CMON access to a 100Mbps cloud at every Telus POP.
Enter Rossland. Rossland is in SD20 and the fiber build obviously presents us with a great opportunity. CMON approached city council again this year with this new opportunity. Fortunately the work a number of us had done in encouraging the right people to run for council in the last election had worked and now we have a tech savvy council (including Lora, Brian's spouse) and this council was interested! Council appointed a technology advisory council to look into this opportunity and both Brian and I were asked to be on it.
The SD20 build will be reaching Rossland sometime this fall. We are currently looking at adding 96 strands to their build once it enters Rossland if we get council approval. Tomorrow night we will be presenting our recommendations to council. Those recommendations are to join CMON ($4 per person based on last census), purchase 96 strands of fiber and allocate funds for a feasibility study. There are time pressures due to the build - if we do not buy the fiber now then we would have to pay for all the engineering to be done again in the future if we decided to go with the build, otherwise we would do the feasibility study first. There is very little possibility that council will not approve the request.
No decisions have been made as to what the final network and governing body will look like, except that it will be open access and use Packet Front's AON (Active Optical Network, the opposite of PON Passive Optical Networking)equipment. AON networks using Packet Front's equipment allow the end user to change service providers instantly with the click of a mouse. This is not possible on PON networks where that is controlled by the network provider. Open Access networks ensure everyone with a service to offer can offer it over the network for the same cost (no advantage to large companies) and the network provider will not offer any services other than network. Most of us seem to be leaning toward a municipal utility owned by the municipality and operated under contract by CMON or some other network provider, but there may be private ownership as well. The only given is that the network MUST be open access or it can not be connected to CMON. besides, the whole point of this exercise is to get away from monopoly like control over our economic future by telecom providers who control what we can do on the network.
So that's where we stand right now, and Frank that's how I've been contributing and why I was so damned jealous of your attendance at WTF :-) I really wanted to be there and to tell participants what we re up to out here.
Posted by The Dynamic Driveler at July 11, 2004 08:00 PM