Ontario County, N.Y., is a rural/suburban community outside Rochester, and already a role model for its self-funded 180-mile fiber optic ring. The county is about to set another example for aspiring broadband communities hankering for ARRA dollars.
Leveraging its $7.5-billion, middle-mile network, the county has roped in Verizon Wireless for laying out the last mile fiber-optic link to its towers, thus enabling this county to be the first rural area to be 4G enabled.
"Verizon Wireless is contracting with us to build its laterals through all of their cellular towers. What we hope that will do is that in the fourth quarter this year when Verizon announces their 4G rollout, we will probably be the most rural area in the nation to be part of Verizon's 4G technology roll out," said Ed Hemminger CIO of the county.
Under this deal, Verizon is leasing fiber to connect all of the company's cell towers in Ontario County to provide more reliable cellular service to its customers in the region. Construction of this fiber ring continues to be on schedule and on budget, with the entire project scheduled to be completed at the end of 2010 -- with over 107 miles of dark fiber already laid out.
Indeed there are many things to learn from this upstate New York county that is a mix of very urban and very rural geography.
For instance Ontario county realized way back in 2001 that it had to build a virtual super highway to retain existing businesses and attract new ones. More importantly, it also realized that the only way to ensure affordable but high-quality Internet would be to fund such a network on its own instead of depending on private-sector or the federal-government capital.
Thus, a unique financing model was crafted. The country formed a not-for-profit development corporation called The Finger Lakes Regional Telecommunications Development Corp. (FLRTDC) to develop and manage an open-access, fiber-optic ring, which it christened Axcess Ontario. This company received $1 million from Ontario county to pay for use of the fiber network for 25 years, as well as a $1.5 million no-interest loan for the project. Axcess also got $4.3 million as a loan against annual payments of the property tax that it gets from a pipeline through the county.
The other notable feature of this project -- unlike many other municipal roll-outs in the rest of the country -- is that Axcess Ontario doesn't actually provide broadband service to businesses and consumers itself. Instead it is leasing capacity to "all-comers," inviting them to use the fiber ring to enhance their broadband infrastructure.
"This was another crucial decision for us because we realized early on that a county that has little experience in telecom services should not be providing such services," said Hemminger. "Instead a county should allow the private sector to provide services they are so good at. We are different from most municipalities because when they build fiber like this, they try to provide Internet services, phone or TV."
Besides Verizon -- that is rolling out wireless services, said Hemminger -- the county has roped in two other telecom companies like Finger Lakes Technology Group (a competitive local exchange carrier), and TW Telecom, that are building their own last-mile solutions to provide other telecom services.
The county has also applied to become a trial location for Google's pursuit to offer faster broadband networks to select communities in America.
"We believe that a county's responsibility should start and end with the creation of the public infrastructure," added Hemminger. "And this is important because to ensure economic development it is important that access to that infrastructure should be cheap, which only a quasi-government organization like a county can afford."
Ontario county has set a payback period of 25 years for FLRTDC. "This payback period is far more than the 3 to 4 years of payback that most private telecom companies allow," said Hemminger. "In Ontario country any company that wants to build a last-mile solution now has a 180-mile fiber infrastructure that is very inexpensive to lease, and to allow them to serve very rural as well as urban areas and be able to create solutions which are the most cost effective in the country."
Still, said Hemminger, economic development should lie at the core of all broadband roll-outs in the country. "The foundation of this project was economic development; a key factor that sets us apart from other municipalities, possibly in the nation. Our goal is to create a situation where Ontario county is considered globally competitive to bring new business and/or retain existing business. New York is not known to be the cheapest place to do business. But we could be the best place to do business with this infrastructure."
Small wonder, then, that this project has already put Ontario county at the forefront of the country's efforts to improve broadband access. The FCC, for instance, has recognized Axcess Ontario as a role model for other broadband projects that are seeking funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
And although the network isn't fully rolled out yet, businesses and institutions have started benefiting from this infrastructure. Take the instance of CherryPharm, a food processing company in the Country that houses its data with a cloud-computing provider based in the West. Constant connectivity to the cloud is critical to CherryPharm's business, says the company, and it would not have been able to use cloud computing without the fiber ring.
The other notable example is The Technology Farm, a research and development initiative in the county in the areas of food and agriculture that depends solely on the ring.
"Ontario county has reinvented itself as one of the few communities and counties in Upstate New York to step into a more balanced economy. They have already created 2,500 tech jobs and, with Cornell University, Hobart College and other world-class academic institutes in the region, they are leveraging the rich agricultural base to transform that industry into a modern, R&D based farming region," said Louis Zacharilla, co-founder of The Intelligent Community Forum, a think tank that studies the economic and social development of the 21st Century community.
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