September 13, 2010
Today is a great day for the schools and communities of the Thumb! The USDA announced today that Air Advantage, LLC of Frankenmuth has been awarded a loan/grant combination through the ARRA Broadband stimulus program called BIP. REMC 10 and it's 3 ISD's and 23 Local District member schools partnered with Air Advantage and Saginaw Valley State University on the application.
The award will result in the building of over 350 miles of fiber optic cable to connect all public school districts and ISD's within REMC 10. The network will also interconnect to existing fiber in St. Clair and Bay Counties and provide redundancy into Lapeer County. The connection in Bay and St. Clair Counties will connect to a larger state wide network currently being built by Merit Network of Ann Arbor using round 1 stimulus dollars.
Residential and business customers will also benefit by the expansion of the Air Advantage wireless nework in the Greater Thumb region. This expansion will mean the possibility of faster broadband service to existing customers and a greatly expanded coverage area that should provide broadband access to those currently limited to only dial-up or satellite based Internet providers.
What will be connected?
-The 23 local public school districts in Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola Counties
-Huron ISD (Sanilac and Tuscola ISD's are already connected)
-An interconnection into Bay County allowing SVSU high speed access to the Thumb and to their Macomb Campus
-An interconnection to the Merit "Reach-3MC" round 1 ARRA BTOP funded network in both Bay and St. Clair Counties
-Multiple hospitals and other health care facilities in Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola Counties
-Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola County Governmental facilities including Central Dispatch
-Public Libraries in Huron, Sanilac and Tuscola Counties (most will be connected via wireless technologies, those that are directly on the fiber path will be connected via fiber)
-Redundant link from Tuscola to Lapeer County and from Tuscola to Huron County
-Numerous new and existing wireless towers
What will the network do?
This network will allow for high speed (10Gbps) transmission of voice, video and data between the school districts and other entities attached. This will result in the ability to collaboratively purchase equipment such as servers, phone systems, disaster recovery devices, firewalls, etc. and software such as student and financial management systems. As an example, without the network each of the 23 local districts and 3 ISD's have a separate e-mail server, with the network we could easily share 1 or 2 larger servers saving the cost of the initial equipment purchase, maintenance contracts, technical support and energy costs. This same example could apply to any of the dozens of servers that the typical school district operates.
More and more applications are moving to the "cloud" meaning that they are hosted on the Internet. Sites such as Discovery Education for video streaming and Google Apps are all great resources but require a fast and reliable Internet connection to make effective use of. The Internet access currently available in the Thumb comes at a high price and with limited availability. The network will allow the connected entities to collaboratively buy larger volumes of bandwidth at reduced prices from service providers virtually anywhere in the state.
Schools are also doing a larger amount of online learning through video conferencing, online curriculum sites such as Compass Learning, E2020 and Virtual Schools such as Michigan Virtual University. Again, each of these resources require a robust and reliable Internet connection to be successful.
Is fiber optic a long term solution?
One of the great things about fiber optic technology is that we have only began to scratch the surface of it's capability. Because it is a glass cable that has lasers connected at each end, the data literally travels at the speed of light. The limiting factor at this point is always the electronics connected at each end. The electronics that will be purchased for this network will be 10 Gigabits per second for each school location (that's 10 billion bits per second). For comparison purposes, a T1 line is 1.54 Mbps (1.54 million bits per second), doing the simple math tells you that 10Gbps is over 6,600 times faster than the 1.54Mbps that a T1 is capable of. On top of this, newer technologies are allowing multiple light wavelengths to travel on the same strand of fiber at the same time, each one running at 10Gbps. Each site will be connected with multiple strands of fiber for future expansion and redundancy. In the future if 100Gbps or something even faster becomes available it will require simply changing the end equipment, not the fiber on the poles or in the ground.
Timelines
We are anxious to get started on this project. The ARRA money has to be fully utilized within a 3 year window so we will be moving very quickly. We will post a more thorough project timeline on this web site in the future.
Other resources:
Click here to access the REMC 10 Press Release announcing the funding
Click here to access the Air Advantage Press Release announcing the funding
Click here for a big picture map of the regional fiber project
Click here for a more detailed map of the Huron ISD connections
Click here for a more detailed map of the Sanilac ISD connections
Click here for a more detailed map of the Tuscola ISD connections