Trail to lead, not just in Teck, but in Tech
By Kyra Hoggan
The City of Trail may become a technological leader as early as this summer, according to city councillor Sean Mackinlay.
Reporting to council from the Governance and Operations Committee (GOC), Mackinlay said the Columbia Basin Broadband Corporation (CBBC) has now posted a Request for Proposal on BC Bid for the installation of the fibre optics through the downtown core.
“This will give the City of Trail a very competitive edge, especially for downtown businesses,” he said. “It will create a connectivity on par with New York, London, Hong Kong – any major city in the world.”
He said the city already committed, in 2012, $145,000 to installing the fibre optic system ($50,000 coming from a Southern Interior Development Trust grant). The delay, he said, was because the city wanted to incorporate the installation into existing plans like the highway project to save on money and resources. The GOC report also said the project was deferred due to delays in securing permitting to use pole mounts for some of the fibre installation.
“Mayor Bogs has been a very strong supporter of this for years, since before I came on council,” he said, explaining there have been a variety of attempts to bring the Kootenays online to modern metropolitan standards through the CMON initiative, which was eventually bought out by the Columbia Basin Trust’s CBBC.
Now, finally, Trail could have the fibre optic hub as soon as this summer.
And he said it’s not just good for commercial interests, pointing to the hospital’s centralized online data base.
“There have been issues when the Internet connection goes down – there have been problems with diagnostics and information coming from places like Kelowna,” he said. “This is going to be very important for everyone.”
When asked if the city should be involving itself in what is arguably a private enterprise outside the mandate of municipal governance, Mackinlay said the technology is too new for it be clear whose mandate it really is.
“There are a lot of things that aren’t necessarily a municipal mandate – there’s a lot of gray area,” he said. “Unfortunately, municipalities are becoming a catch-all for everything that falls through the cracks.
“The real question is, is this a service we want and need? It is, so we’ll do it,” he said. “Sometimes we have to pick up the ball to get private interests like Bell or Telus or Rogers to come on board with us later on, once we have the infrastructure in place.”
He said the $145,000 will get the fibre optic line, hub and network installed to the Community Futures building (the post office directly across from City Hall), where it can service the downtown business core, service centres like the aquatic centre and City Hall, and hopefully serve as a hub for commercial providers to extend the network to include the entire area.
“It’s mostly targeted to business and civic structures, but we may be able to have individuals tie directly into it, if they live close enough – we’re not ruling anyone out,” he said, explaining the downtown hub will create the opportunity for any number of offshoots to serve Greater Trail. “All we’re doing is providing that backbone – it’s a starting place that will give us the same potential as all the world’s major cities.”
He said CBBC’s ultimate goal is to create a fibre optic highway throughout the East and West Kootenays, for all participating communities, in many ways eliminating the geographical disadvantages in having a smaller population spread over a large geographical area.
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