FTTH community networking seminar hosted in Medicine Hat

On Feb 11th, 2009, we hosted an informational seminar to help educate community leaders. This group of business leaders, politicians and developers from Medicine Hat, Taber,  Airdrie and Sherwood Park learned about the value of municipal participation in developing a robust communications infrastructure.

Thank you to all our sponsors including:

• SANE Consulting
  
• Economic Development Alliance of South East Alberta
• Community Futures Entre-corp Business Development
  
• Medicine Hat College
• IS-MS and James Hettrick for delivering a wonderful and engaging presentation.
  

In addition to the sponsors, there was also representation from local businessmen, a couple of City Staff as well as Aldermen Ty Schneider and Jeremy Thompson. CHAT News was there and shot a few interviews.

Click here to learn move details about the seminar

Background

As our communications and networking needs have grown over the last several years, a lack of robust high speed internet and communications infrastructure has created a multitude of challenges. Residential and businesses consumers need to maintain adequate communications and the issue has become a substantial obstacle to growth and efficiency.

Internet service providers are not currently able to provide residential and business consumers with cost effective fiber internet access. Having spent the last few years researching the various options available to solve the problems, it became clearly evident that an effective solution required municipal intervention. The result of this research has revealed that there are many municipalities have started projects with similarities. These substantial network communications projects have generally been meet with good success.

Here are just a few links to related information resources:
Alberta SuperNet Website
CBC News article - You can own your network
Globe and Mail Article - Need for Speed
The City of Loma Linda
Rural Broadband Report
United Stated Connected Communities Association
Intelligent Communities
Fiber to the Home Council

The Alberta government intervened at a provincial level with the SuperNet and now there is considerable support for municipalities to get involved. Significant opportunities exist for a municipality to fulfill many of the SuperNet's goals for all Alberta citizens. The SuperNet provides an excellent model to learn from but the project is far from complete.

For additional information please contact Josh Sehn.