Michael Becker - North Shore News
The North Shore Health Region (NSHR) now has a private fibre optic network.
The communications infrastructure was provided by TeraSpan Networks Inc., an Ignition Point company.
Michael Priest, VP sales and marketing for TeraSpan, said the company was alerted to the fibre optic project earlier this year by a counterpart at Shaw Cablesystems. Said Priest, "Shaw had no fibre in the streets and other than the traditional trenching method, it was not something that they could bid on. They called me to come in."
Priest said the Vancouver-based broadband company has proposed four phases of this project for the health region and Lions Gate Hospital. "We have tied from the hospital up St. Georges to 17th to a building they've taken over with a five-year lease for the human resources area. It's about a kilometre of fibre.
"There are plans to go up 17th to where they have a radio shop and bring in the Northmount labs. As of right now they are using it for their human resources."
TeraSpan installs the fibre optic cable without having to dig up the streets. Traditionally streets are trenched and conduit is buried about three feet below the surface. This project used the expansion joint between road curb and sidewalk. Said Priest, "There is a margin there about as wide as a pencil. We cut down that and lay the fibre in there with junction boxes and grouting on top."
If in the future the city fire hall or RCMP headquarters wish to link into the network, it's easily accomplished. The system is deployed in a ring configuration. This also means that if the network is damaged, for example if a backhoe were to dig up a corner and damage the fibre, the health region would not be out of service. The ring network uses something called counter-rotating technology. "The customer would be lit in the opposite direction. We don't build point-to-point networks," Priest said.
Fibre optics technology offers a lot of bandwidth to push data through. In this case there are 24 strands of fibre contained in a casing that acts like a conduit. Priest said just two strands between New York and Los Angeles would facilitate the downloading of 120 million books in about six minutes. The health region plans to eventually connect medical equipment to the network. "The hospital is taken care of. We call if future-proof," Priest said.
Said Robert Taylor, regional manager of Information Technology for the North Shore Health Region, "TeraSpan's dedicated fibre infrastructure has given the health region the secure bandwidth we require today, as well as the ability to scale the solution to meet or exceed our future data and voice requirements."