City Fibre Strategy
Motion
That Council direct Staff to prepare a report with options and costs for expanding the City’s fibre network, based on the City Fibre Strategy presentation made during the 2023-DEC-15 Mayor’s Leaders’ Table meeting.
Sources
That Council direct Staff to prepare a report with options and costs for expanding the City’s fibre network, based on the City Fibre Strategy presentation made during the 2023-DEC-15 Mayor’s Leaders’ Table meeting.
Much. Councilor Brown. Ten c. Thank you, your worship. I did have a couple of questions. I don't know. If. Generally, I'm supportive. I see that. It's just a report for more information, but. Seeing how this conversation has evolved over time, I did have some questions around. Where this motion has ended up. So the first question I have through you to staff is that. There's conversation around redundancy creating a city owned fiber network to connect to different city facilities. But nowhere have I been able to find what is our data usage that we're needing. To preserve between our facilities. How much total data are we needing per day? What is the megabits per second that we're needing to service that. And why is our own fiber network crucial to that when there's quite a few markets or quite a few products on the market that can do the same thing that do not. Have a huge capital price tag. We have mr. Sims here and mr. Sims. With mring in the
room. I defer to him. For his response. Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Simmons. Through your worship. Can you hear me okay? Yes, we can. Through your worship. To. I think the first question was, do we have specific data on our. Per site, I guess bandwidth requirements. The answer is no. I do not know the specifics in terms of order. Bandwidth is from a powerly daily monthly perspective. But what we can say is that. The demand we know will go up. We know that we have currently. Single connections, our own connections between our sites. We have full control over the bandwidth requirements between those sites. I am confident to say that we never had, to my knowledge, any bandwidth restrictions or bandwidth challenges. Like I said, we have control over those sites. The other point about other services on the market. That can facilitate that. There's no argument there, most certainly for the majority of the city priority site. We could connect with the telus. We could connect with the Rogers and or both. And if. They didn't have the existing bandwidth to connect the sites. We could ask for them to. Build it. The challenge with that, however. Is we are in so doing, we would be reliant on their network. Its capacity. And its addressing for lack of Edwards. So if there's any challenges on their side, those sites that were dependent upon it and or had redundancy to it. If there was an outage to those locations. They would really struggle in terms of getting access to services that are of the cIRC building. As well as getting out to the Internet. Further, we know that more and more sites, more applications are going to be coming online, and the bamboo demands are going to increase. So by having our own capacity amongst the sites and its capacity. I want to see limitless, but have exceptional scale. So as more and more services became digital, as more and more service came online, We the city and I'm oit staff, we would have full control of this network. So we could up the bandwidth or produce it as needed. Furthermore, if there was an outage, to any of the sites that had from one of the telco services and we had redundant to our own redundancy is that there would still be connectivity amongst those sites. They still would be able to get out to the Internet. They still have connectivity. And communications between the
city facilities. Thank you, worship. I guess. What I'm struggling with this is, and I understand it's just a report, but. I know how these things evolve through time, and I also know where the genesis of this idea was. And what it's evolved to is what I'm really struggling with is I'll use, for example, sort of a metaphor. We're largely dependent on our watershed that is owned by a third party. Yet the relationship works. And as a result, we're not spending hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase the watershed. And I know people want us always to purchase it. And I think some of the times, the response is well. It's not a problem. It's a solution in search of a problem, and that's what I'm really struggling with this idea here. Is that okay? Yes. Advances and advances, and then all of a sudden, it's a $10. Million price tag for something. That. Are we even clear why we actually need it? It was like, two decades ago. That our city functioned with zero Internet connection for the most part at all. And so there might be very select circumstances where it would be nice to. Have connectivity through emergency. And maybe tell us or Shaw. The land, the copper or the fiber on the ground and goes down. Well, why wouldn't. We just have Starlink back up. Or none of the emergency services rely on Internet, increasingly so, but they still have backup redundant systems. For those mission critical things. So all I'm saying is, yeah, I'll vote in. Favor of this just to get the report and the information. But I have not seen. A single nugget of a problem that has really created. This advanced list along, and I think that should just be a point for pause, especially when the capital expenditure would be in the millions of dollars. Thanks. Thank