Ottawa-Carleton becomes latest municipality to join optical network craze

The completion of CANARIE's cross-Canada optical network combined with the plummeting cost of dark fibre is accelerating the rollout of regional and municipal fibre builds. With municipalities in Quebec and Ontario now firmly committed to dark fibre builds, and announcements pending in British Columbia, Alberta and Nova Scotia, observers say Canada is poised to overtake the U.S. in deploying publicly owned, open access fibre networks for major cities and even small towns. Following the lead of its neighbours in Quebec, Ontario has emerged as the latest province to announce a series of regional and so-called "condominium" fibre builds that promise to deliver gigabit links to schools, libraries, and hospitals for a fraction of the cost of carrier-owned connections. At the provincial level, the Ontario government recently earmarked $57 million to create the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION). In late May, various public and private partners converged in Ottawa to form the Optical Fibre Consortium, creating an optical fibre network for the federal capital. The next day The Ottawa Partnership (TOP) provided final details on its plans to stimulate economic growth, accenting work in telecommunications, software, photonics and four other clusters. The city of Toronto is expected to announce its plans for a mega-city fibre build this fall. Bill St. Arnaud, senior director of advanced networks for CANARIE, cites two reasons for the backbone building boom. "For the longest time everybody thought that fibre was a very expensive technology, that only big carriers could deploy the stuff," he explained to Network Letter. "What we discovered in fact is that it's a very inexpensive technology. Videotron wins contract to build Ottawa fibre network The proliferation of new LAN technologies are also making it easier to connect to fibre networks. "LAN used to be just inside the office but there's new variations of LAN technology that allow LANs to be extended across dark fibre 50, 100 kilometres," he adds. Universities, school boards and other local institutions also tend to have extensive in-house LAN expertise, making the migration to dark fibre all the easier. The Optical Fibre Consortium in Ottawa, of which CANARIE is a member, will link 25 partner sites. Each participant will own and control individual strands of fibre. The network will serve clients like Cisco and the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) in the western suburb of Kanata, to Telesat Canada and the National Research Council (NRC) in the eastern city of Gloucester. The network is being built by Vidéotron Business Network. This is the first time the Quebec-based company has done a build outside its home province. Its current backbone network extends as far as Hull QC, where it connects at the border with Metronet's fibre network. Vidéotron will start construction on the Ontario side this summer with an October target date for completion. Each member of the consortium is charged a fee of $5000 per site to cover costs of design activities and a portion of the operating costs of the consortium. Adding more fibre an option Participants in the project include the Canadian Space Agency, Nortel Networks and both universities in the city. The consortium has closed its membership drive, but OCRI will have another if it decides this summer to further expand the network. If another build is required, it is likely to deliver fibre sometime next year. The current set up provides only for point-to-point bandwidth. But the Ottawa Metropolitan Advanced Network (OMAN) is looking at the establishment of switching or routing of data. OMAN wants to place switching points at the NRC, the Communications Research Centre (CRC) in the west end, and the Regional Municipality of Ottawa Carleton five blocks from Parliament Hill. All three organizations, as well as OMAN itself, are members of the consortium. Groups in Ottawa will be able to run fibre to their nearest OMAN switching point, thus bypassing mesh fibre set ups. Broadband connectivity costs should fall as a result. OMAN will serve as a hub for other networks. It will be a part of CANARIE's CA*net 3 backbone and of the ORION network. The declining cost of fibre makes the possibility of a further Ottawa build much more likely. St. Arnaud reports that his organization has just signed a deal that will see it run six fibres from its headquarters in the downtown core to the CRC. It will cost CANARIE a one-time rate of $22,000 for a network which will be in place for 20 years. Amortized over the two decades, it will cost around $88 per month. "And that's unlimited bandwidth," he raves. "It's not like five megabits, it's not 10 megabits, it's whatever bandwidth you want to put on it. Now there's companies like broadband.com which have announced a 10 gigabit Ethernet transceiver—that's 10 billion bits per second—OC 192, they'll go 50 kilometres for 88 bucks."The need for gigabit speeds The higher speeds may seem excessive at first glance, but information issued at the time of the launch back up St. Arnaud. OCRI currently has a 15 Mbps LMCS link to CRC and yet sometimes it is unable to participate in activities on CA*net 3 due to insufficient bandwidth. Following the lighting of the backbone, OCRI will be connected with gigabit Ethernet giving it 1000 Mbps of bandwidth. Should the organization eventually outgrow that, it can upgrade to 10 Gbps links by switching to another fibre driver. The rapid deployment surprises even St. Arnaud, who has been preaching the gospel of bandwidth for several years now. At one time he thought commercial rollout of a fibre network was unlikely to occur much before 2003. But he soon had to abandon that timetable as bandwidth started to be available much more quickly. Private companies have been eager to join in the development of high-technology networks. There is some risk involved but that comes with the territory, according to the co-chair of the Ottawa Partnership. "One of the big factors about technology is that it's a risk-driven business," Rod Bryden told a news conference at the inauguration of the economic growth campaign. "The reason that money pours into it is you win more than you lose."

Ottawa-Carleton becomes latest municipality to join optical network craze

News | 06/05/2000 4:00 am EDT

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