Thomas Asp with CTC Technology & Energy, the consultants hired to provide guidance about how to best install a high-speed fiber network to serve the town government’s needs, strongly recommended Tuesday night that the town build its own.
The chairman of the town’s Technology Advisory Board, Lisa Mannion, and member Daniel Grigg agreed. Gerard Hays, president and founder of the Wireless Research Center of North Carolina, who also consulted about the project, did not speak but smiled broadly from the audience. Grigg said, “What the data tells me is that the most compelling case is to own [and that] is best in the long run.”
Asp said the town could install 19 miles of fiber that would serve all the town offices and parks with expanded routing that would include selected business parks in town for $2,750,000, all within 18 months.
Asp and his team found the financing would last for 10 years but the town would have a 30-year asset with no cost increase to itself to increase speeds as needed and with only minimal costs for new sites. For the first 10 years the estimated annual cost is $468,780, but that drops to $114,300 in year 11. Earlier in the presentation he listed the advantages/disadvantages of leasing from an existing server, with the disadvantages being the greater.
According to the consultants’ recommendation, the town will not be competing with the private sector. It can in the future, however, offer services to resident and businesses by deploying infrastructure and offering a platform for smaller ISPs to begin doing business in the town, encouraging a competitive residential and business broadband marketplace.
Asp mentioned other Wake towns including Cary, Apex, Holly Springs and Fuquay-Varina. “They are all doing the same thing for their core needs.”
Wake Forest IT Director Tom LaBarge said he already had the detailed engineering design and asked if he could go ahead with beginning to implement that if the board agreed.
When Commissioner Jim Thompson asked about the speed, LaBarge said he is already using 10 GBS from town hall to the operations center and serving several other town sites at 1 GBS. “It all depends on the hardware. We can adjust fairly easily for that.”
Because the Tuesday meeting was a work session, the commissioners could not vote on the project, but they did agree to place it on the consent agenda for their business meeting on Oct. 17.
“I’m tickled about this,” Commissioner Margaret Stinnett said. “To even have an asset like this that’s paid for after 10 years that will benefit the town services is just amazing. Thank you very much for your hard work, all of you.”
The commissioners had studied the 25-page Town Network Business Case provided by Asp and his team.
5 Responses
As presented, it will be an internal network for the Town to serve and connect Town offices and parks…and “will not compete with the private sector”.
The next sentence in the story says the network may expand to serve business and residential customers. Let’s be sure we know what we are getting into. If we go for the latter, be aware of the many municipal broadband service projects that have failed across the country. Search the internet for failed municipal broadband projects or broadband boondoggles… Provo, Utah; and many, many others.
I understand the logic for government facility connectivity. Be wary of taxpayer investment into something more. Don’t burden me with additional taxes down the road to prop up a failed system.
Does the consultant “have any skin in the game”? Crunch a few more numbers, review, ask questions and crunch again. Have a public hearing or two. Post the full plan and all documents on the Town’s website. Improve transparency.
If you want to attract high tech businesses, you need to invest in the entire town. High tech employees often work from home, and not having high caliber options for local area employees at their home is not going to bring high tech companies. The city has to up the game considerably to challenge a location with a nearby airport, top rated Universities within 10-15 minutes, and infrastructure to support the employees and their families (read: highly rated schools and diverse restaurants,increase in property values), and ease of moving around.
I believe the idea is to build this town facility and business network to have the backbone which a private provider can then tap into for residential offering. Same model attracted Ting in Holly Springs. This seems much more realistic than hoping any provider would make that large investment to run everything on their cost a la Google. I haven’t heard since long time about the RFI which the town contracted CTC for… Was that a dead end?
Businesses pay taxes that help to fund their amenities, better amenities CAN lead to more businesses which in turn pay more taxes. Wake Forest is working hard to shift the tax base more towards business and away from residential, more bang for the buck and less drain on town resources. Also I read that the plan can expand and offer residential service.
Not sure about this. Importing with the private sector is NOT a function of a local government.
On top of that, any plan that doesn’t include residential should be thrown out immediately. Otherwise it’s the citizens paying for the business community’s amenities. If the businesses want to get together to fund that, let them do it.