Bach Seat

i3 America has announced the first U.S. pilot of its Fibrecity open access network in Quincy, IL Light Reading reports. The firm believes the time is right in the U.S. market, based on the Google (GOOG) inspired boom in municipal fiber projects said Brian Foley, VP of sales for i3 America. “We are excited to be working with Quincy on this pilot — the city has been extremely cooperative in moving things forward,” Foley told LightReading.

i3 partners with municipalities and municipally owned utilities to deploy the i3 Fibrecity system in sewer systems. “By working in partnership with the municipality, we will take their information about the existing pipes and put that into our GIS systems,” Alasdair Rettie, technical director of i3 Group Ltd. said in the LightReading article. “We will ask where they have problems, because we don’t want to put fiber in areas where there is already an issue. Before we deploy, we will clean the sewers and do a survey of the sewer lines to pick the routes we want to go, and where it’s needed, we will repair the sewers.”

By using the waste-water pipes to deploy fiber, i3 claims to trim 30 percent to 50 percent off the cost of deploying fiber. Light Reading says the i3 patented technology secures the fiber optic cable to the bottom of a sewer and is actually designed to enable sediment that might normally settle there to move farther downstream.

i3 will build and operate the local loop fiber network for its partners in Illinois on an open access basis, Rettie stated in the article. The parties then either work out a revenue-sharing deal or enable the municipality to use the network for its own purposes, including providing fiber connections to schools, video security monitoring, traffic management, public safety, and/or subsidized connections into homes of low-income residents.

According to Light Reading, the Fibrecity network is an open-access system, based on FTTH optoelectronics from Ericsson AB (ERIC) and Enablence Technologies Inc. (ENA) which uses i3’s system of running fiber through sewers to a place  near the home, where the fiber is then micro-trenched to an Optical Network Terminal (ONT) that has four Gigabit Ethernet ports. Fibrecity is designed to use a 1-12 split for its passive optical network, versus the 1-32 split commonly used in US fiber deployments, so each household is guaranteed 100 Mbit/s symmetrically, Rettie says, with the ability to burst, possibly with a boost-button paid service.

By taking an open-access approach, i3 can allow multiple service providers offering different services to address each household. “We encourage much more than triple play,” Rettie told Light Reading. “We have service providers today using IP connections to provide home security services; an applications service provider could use this to provide cloud computing; your employer could rent one of the ports to enable work-at-home. It’s all about thinking outside the box.” Open APIs are built into the i3 approach — it has tied into the APIs of Ericsson and Enablence and can offer service providers various service templates, featuring different upstream and downstream speeds, that they can then choose to offer.

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Fibrecity seems like a no-brainer. Besides the flexibility and cost savings a private network presents, other benefits include:

1. On-going maintenance – Over the last 8 months on our current network, we have had two 24 hour+ outages due to fires, one outage due to gunshots and one from an auger. None of these incidents would have happened if the clients fiber backbone was in the sewer instead of on poles.
2. Allows owners to bypass the outrageous pole make-ready demands that utilities make to prevent private fiber networks from being built.  I have seen a private utility delay a public project in public right-of-way for over 2 years.
3. Finally, i3 says it repairs sewers as needed, which is a money savings that any tax-payer will appreciate.

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.