The City of Burnaby is moving ahead with creating its own fibre network.
At its Oct. 16 meeting, city council approved a strategic direction that would see a telecommunications system in place in the next 15 years or so.
The city’s existing fibre network connects the city hall campus – city hall, West Building, Deer Lake and Fire Hall 1.
“It’s a much better deal for us as a city,” said Shari Wallace, the city’s chief information officer, about expanding the network. “If we try to buy commercial services to ramp up to that same rate of our technology usage, it would become prohibitively expensive over time.”
In 2015, the city entered into a 10-year agreement with Telus for high-speed broadband service for 26 sites at “advantageous rates.” In exchange, Telus could install small cell devices on infrastructure such as light poles.
Each site using a commercial service is costing the city an average of $13,500 per year, notes a staff report.
“We know when our contract with Telus ends, that’s when we can start to realize the majority of the savings,” said Wallace, adding other neighbouring municipalities like New Westminster are also forging ahead with building their own fibre network.
To save construction costs, she added the city will piggy-back on other civic projects, something she called a “dig-once approach.”
“What we’re doing right now is we’re building it as the opportunity comes up. If we decided that we were just going to set this up as a single project, it would cause significant disruption to the citizens of Burnaby as well because we’d be digging up a lot of road, and we don’t really want to do that.”
According to the report, if the city did the fibre installations as independent projects, it would come with a $37 million price tag over eight years. By having cost-sharing agreements with other city departments and other partners, construction costs would be reduced to $17 million over 15 years.
Staff will continue to focus on buildings that have the highest usage, Wallace said. The city has 22 major network sites (Burnaby Public Library), 55 medium-sized sites (Bonsor Recreation Complex) and various access points (traffic lights). The next priority sites include the Laurel and Still Creek works yards, and Fire Hall 7.
