Wants cash to cover O-NET development costs

The Town of Olds has received $600,000 from the province ñ about half of what it asked for ñ to market O-NET, the town-owned Internet and phone service, to other communities.

And it's hoping to receive another grant to help cover development costs to create O-NET in the first place.

Mayor Mike Muzychka says they hope to hear more about that early next year. He notes Infrastructure Minister Sandra Jansen has promised to visit Olds in January.

The $600,000 grant, provided under the CARES (Community and Regional Economic Support program) was announced during the annual Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) convention, held in Calgary Nov. 22 to 24. A delegation of Olds councillors and officials attended that convention.

Olds had applied for a $1.2-million grant via that program for O-NET marketing costs.

Muzychka says town officials weren't surprised to only receive half of what they asked for.

"Well, we always overreach, right," he said with a laugh during an interview with the Albertan. "We weren't overly disappointed. We kind of expected it to fall in that area. We hadn't spent any money, obviously. Anything would have been great."

The other money is expected to come out in the new year, possibly as early as January, when Jansen comes to town.

"Basically what's happening is the government seems to be classifying broadband as utilities, so we're hoping it's going to fall right under infrastructure," Muzychka says.

"This is something brand new. We haven't applied for anything yet," Muzychka says. "We're very preliminary in talks with the minister of infrastructure.

"We've lobbied Ms. Jansen; we've invited her here and it sounds like she's going to stop in some time in January and have a tour of Olds ñ of O-NET in particular."

Muzychka says the hope is that new money coming in January could be used to help cover the costs for infrastructure laid down for O-NET.

He says since O-NET has served as a kind of template or test case for entities other communities might like to create, it's hoped the province will help cover some of those costs, for example, the fibre optic cable.

"What we're hoping is, because we have a model put together for other municipalities to follow, we're hoping that they'll back-fund some of the investment that Olds has made," Muzychka says.

"There isn't a whole bunch of detail how that would happen yet ñ and even the minister herself and her staff weren't sure, because they're still waiting for the way it's going to be structured to come down from actually the federal government first."

"Normally these grants come to people who have not started their projects yet, but we're hoping to talk them into back-funding a bit of it because there's so much information that we can share with other municipalities," Muzychka adds.

"You know, O-NET's made a couple of mistakes here and there and we've learned from them, and we have a wealth of knowledge on how to go forward with this type of project, so we're hoping the ministry sees the value in helping us out a bit with that and in turn, we'll help other municipalities."

With the advent of things like cloud computing, Muzycka was asked if all that O-NET infrastructure is now obsolete.

"No, it's not; I asked," he says. "That was one of my initial concerns before I ran for mayor, was ëis this thing going to be obsolete in five years?' And the resounding answer I have from multiple (sources) -- not just O-NET ñ is no, it won't be.

"I mean, you can always pipe up an antenna and spread it over the airwaves, but you need the hard wire to run the amount of bandwidth that is running through that already," he adds.

"You can't get the same connectivity on your cellphone as you can with your home computer. In fact, computers don't run as fast as what can be carried through those fibre optic wires. They're talking it's 25 years at least, if not longer. A couple of people have told me it's 50 years."