I am a long term resident of St. Albert, recently retired from a long career providing strategic and tactical technology direction to governments, municipalities, industry and media. I read with dismay the city’s recent adoption of the flawed “Smart” City Master Plan. I call upon council to rescind their approval of this plan.
To address each issue within the report would require a dissertation, hence I will just comment on one visible priority – strategy A1: “Develop the City’s municipal broadband network to form the foundation of St. Albert’s “Smart” and connected future.” The proposal? “A.1.1 Accelerate the development of a municipal fibre-optic broadband network that will connect current and future facilities and other assets” – a strategy that carries a purported $8,500,000 price tag, may/may not include the extended delivery and implementation times, the associated disruption effects, the ongoing access fees or the ongoing operational fees. A service purported to initially only offer 1Gigabit service.
Let me clear a basic misconception. Fibre-optic cable is just an engineered piece of simple glass tubing. That is all, nothing more. It is a contributing but not governing factor in providing broadband connectivity. In large part, the speed of the connectivity is mostly set by the transmitting/receiving equipment – in this case a laser system at large, sending and receiving many different colors of light through a lens into the simple glass tubing. This same laser – using a similar lens system – works as well using free space optical transmission. A technology used not just in Alberta, but in extreme climatic areas such as the arctic, desert and open seas.
A readily available and proven technology that is often deployed for less than 30% the cost of fibre, has minimal to no disruption impact, is environmentally unobtrusive, can be installed in a matter of weeks (including winter installations), has extremely low ongoing costs and is arguable as or more secure than the fibre, in fact, it is secure enough to be used by the military. And what about using the even lower capital and operational cost emergent transport options such as those currently being deployed in Australia, Europe and the United States?
Why should we, the constituents of St. Albert, be once again called upon to pay another financial penalty to install expensive, disruptive and fixed technology? Is it smart to implement what was done in the past decade – or is it smart to implement what is being done in today’s time? Would it not be smart to adopt more cost effective evergreen technologies such as those typically being deployed in other large urban centers?
As to the Internet access offset costs as reported in the St. Albert Gazette (Oct. 5) – this has nothing to do with fibre-optics. The city will still have to purchase its desired Internet access – it will just have to negotiate a different contract, which it can do now if it so desires. Many secure, cost effective options abound today for lower cost distribution of this service to all city facilities. So the purported $600,000 annual “savings” is at best moot. And to suggest that the city will offer this increasingly commoditized service in competition with the very firms it wishes to attract to St. Albert? Many successful country and municipal models exist to enable economic development and provide cost effective, reliable, secure and high-speed telecommunications utility services. Government competition with the private sector is not one.
Should St. Albert become a “Smart-City”? Absolutely. But let us be smart about getting there.
I call upon council to rescind approval of this plan.
Brian Napier P. Eng., St. Albert
