Province and Northern Health sign up for CityWest fibre service

The new fibre link to Terrace has brought CityWest some new customers, as both the Provincial government and Northern Health have agreed to lease space on the fibre connection along Highway 16. CityWest also took the opportunity of its business announcement to reassure Rupertites that enhanced services are on their way to the North coast. In addition to the anticipated arrival of Digital cable this fall, CityWest hopes to be offering mobile data services by late 2007.

Of course, many citizens might just be content with faster upload and download speeds, if ancillary information gleaned from local users and chat boards are any indication.

Both the Daily News and The Northern View offered up their interpretations of the latest developments from CityWest.

NEW LINK GIVES CITY FIBRE IN ITS HIGH TECH DIET
By Leanne Ritchie
The Daily News
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Pages One and Three

CityWest has announced two new customers for its new fibre link to Terrace.

Both the provincial government and Northern Health have agreed to lease space on the company’s fibre link that runs along Highway 16, between Prince Rupert and Terrace.

Rob Brown, CityWest general manager, said that prior to the installation of the fibre link last summer, Prince Rupert’s communication services were carried via a microwave to Terrace.

The new link will allow CityWest to look at offering new services, such as digital TV, as well as providing the means for the company to address future growth in the community.

“The fibre link doesn’t provide new service for Prince Rupert on its own, it enables CityWest or any other company to provide the service,” said Brown.

“Basically, the fibre link makes it possible and opens up the opportunity for new service, just as it will open up the opportunity for new industry or organizations like Northern Health or the provincial government to offer new services.

“The message is that these new services were not possible for Prince Rupert without this fibre link.”

CityWest plans to offer Digital TV to its Prince Rupert customers in late summer or early fall and offer mobile data services (e mail services through the cellular network) planned for late 2007.

Apart from opening access to new services in the future, the fibre link has also been cited as vital to serving growing communications needs for a community that is on the verge of economic and population growth, said Brown.

“With studies indicating increased jobs, increased population, and new home starts rising for Prince Rupert in the future, the fibre link became vital to CityWest’s ability to offer more television channels, or more internet connections in the future,” said Brown.

“The fibre link was need for CityWest to be able to continue to serve Prince Rupert’s communications needs in the future.”

The fibre link did suffer some flood damage earlier this spring when the waters of the Skeena broke its banks and flooded Highway 16, Brown said any outage will cause some problems, however having the fibre link in addition to the microwave link means the region does have some back-up capability.

The fibre link kept the community connected twice through the winter months when there were outages on the microwave connection due to storms and equipment failures.

“Any outage is going to cause some problems but having two separate connections, the fibre link and the microwave, ensures that critical communications will continue,” said Brown.

“This was not the case prior to the fibre-link where one outage would wipe out all communications to the area.”

Navigata Communications Inc. was CityWest’s first major customer on the fiber link.


Fibre link to enable text messaging in Rupert
By Brooke Ward
The Northern View
Jul 18 2007

The announcement of two large Fibre-link deals last Thursday had representatives at CityWest seeing the future in high definition as the company revealed future plans for uses of the Fibre-link and crews continue to work around town to increase the bandwidth to enable customers to access Digital Cable TV.

Both the Provincial government and Northern Health Authority have leased space on the company’s fibre-link along Highway 16 between Terrace and Prince Rupert, which is beneficial to all parties involved explained CityWest General Manger Rob Brown.

“Selling them services means increased revenue for us, but at the same time it gives them the opportunity to allow better connectivity to their local services,” he said.

And they may not be the only companies benefiting from the Fibre-link in the future, suggests Brown.

“Whether it be another telephone company or any business, the Fibre-link opens up the opportunity to new industry or organizations.”

In the past, all of Prince Rupert’s communication services were carried by a microwave route that is still operational today, albeit at it’s capacity, making it a limiting factor for development of new communications services in the area.

“With studies showing increased jobs, increased population, and new home starts rising for Prince Rupert into the future, the fibre-link became vital to CityWest’s ability to offer more television channels or more internet connections or faster internet connections in the future,” explained Brown, adding that the fibres are virtually limitless.

“It depends on what you put on the end of them, but if one becomes full we have 48 fibres in there. It really is a novel piece of technology.”

The Fibre-link was the first step towards the Digital Cable TV planned for early fall and is also essential to the mobile data services, such as text-messaging capability and Blackberry devices, expected to be available in Prince Rupert as early as the end of the year.

“I’ve done some checking around with businesses in town and they don’t see a demand for [mobile data services],” said Brown.

“There is going to be more, depending on the job that you have and the access that you need. There is already the demand amongst visitors and tourists.”

Brown also believes in the theory ‘if you build it, they will come,’ particularly among the teenaged cell-phone carrying crowd.

“Texting is the number one feature, beyond voice, used on cell phones,” he explained.

“I don’t see it as a big thing in Rupert, but the opportunity will be there for them if they want or need it.”

Corrections and Errors department: thanx to a tip from a faithful reader, we learned of a spelling error in the above slug line for this story. So to make things clear, they were not singing at CityWest, well maybe they were at one time, but not when we heard of this story. The correct headline is now in place, CityWest is no doubt thankful that two government agencies have SIGNED to lease some space, and not that they sat down to sing.