SUNDRE – The municipality is now officially connected to the 21st century with a completed fibre optic, high speed internet network within the town’s boundaries.
But while businesses and residents now have the option to sign up for services that range in symmetrical up- and down-load speeds from 100 megabits per second to a gigabit, municipally-owned buildings will for the time being remain under the town’s existing provider through Alberta’s SuperNet, said the town’s director of corporate services.
Responding to questions raised in light of a recent departmental report that confirmed the completion of the broadband internet infrastructure project and whether the municipality would therefore soon be able to activate a suite of webcams installed more than a year ago in council chamber to either broadcast meetings live or post recordings online after the fact, Chris Albert said, “There’s a lot of work that still has to be done with our IT infrastructure.”
But while details including a specific timeline have not yet been fully fleshed out, Albert confirmed the municipal office is physically connected to the new fibre optic network.
“We have a hard wire in,” he told the Albertan, adding the final hurdle largely pertains to addressing both software and hardware issues to ensure compatibility.
“We need to get the connection properly configured to our firewall, and we’re actually doing a firewall update in the near future,” he said. “So, we’re holding off making that change until we get the new firewall in place.”
And even once the new firewall is ready, the remaining municipally-owned buildings – such as the shop, the fire hall and the community centre – will also have to be properly configured, he said.
“Our buildings are all connected via point-to-point satellite dishes,” he said.
“We’ve got satellite dishes on each of the buildings, so all of the signals funnel through one central location,” he elaborated.
“So, we then have to get those configured in order to actually be using the Xplore connection,” he said, adding the town for now remains on the SuperNet, which feeds into the fire hall since that building once housed the old town office.
“The SuperNet goes into the fire hall and that signal, using those dishes, gets bounced between the various buildings,” he said.
“We’ve got a lot of configuration (work) to do with the network and the IT infrastructure in order to actually be able to use Xplore.”
Above and beyond technical matters, there are also legislative concerns to keep in mind. Whether broadcasting live streams or posting recorded video of a meeting after the fact, town officials still have to work through the municipality’s procedural bylaw, he said
“There’s still a legislative side that the CAO will have to work through and make sure that we’ve got everything crossed before we can start kind of transmitting,” he said.
But when the cameras go live is just a matter of time.
“There is still every intention of using them,” he said.
Reiterating that there is no set timeline, Albert said a best-case scenario would be to have everything ready for the new year.
Meanwhile, he said when asked that the suite of webcams is not about to become obsolete any time soon.
“They will still be good,” he said. “We do test the system every once in a while, just to make sure it’s still working.”
The setup features multiple cameras that are able to provide angles on the entire council chamber.
“It’ll pan and zoom on speakers; on what microphone comes on,” he said.
When the cameras were initially installed, town staff anticipated it would take some time before the municipality could get connected and actually start using them, he said.
“So when we set it up, we did future-proof it so that it wasn’t obsolete a year after we turned it on; it was factored in. We got something that I think will be fairly robust for a few years,” he said.
“A lot of the components are good for quite a while,” he said, adding there are no immediate concerns about the possibility of required replacement parts no longer being available.
Jim Hall, the municipality’s manager of operations, recently confirmed that Cross Cut Directional Boring, the contractor brought in by Xplore to put in all of the underground infrastructure, had wrapped up their work and packed up late this summer.
Hall is also among local residents who signed up for high-speed internet through Xplore.
“I love their service,” he said, adding he was also pleased with the company’s customer relations department in addressing earlier system roll-out hiccups that resulted in occasional outages which have since largely been ironed out.
The project was made possible in part through funding from the federal government as well as feasibility studies that had previously been conducted by the municipality.
