It is not the Internet, that amorphous world at the end of a computer chirping digital zeros and ones into servers around the world.

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1 Fiber optic line opening gigabits of opportunities BY FRANK ZUFALL In human history, development has followed transportation. Cities sprang up along rivers and ports of call, then roads and rail lines, followed by interstate highways and international airports. Now, in the 21st Century, add the digital highway. The good news for Washburn County: The Information Age equivalent of O Hare Airport, Interstate 94 and Amtrak all balled up in one will be here by the spring of 2012 when a fiber optics line is laid from Eau Claire off Hwy. 53 through Rice Lake north to Spooner and Superior. It is not the Internet, that amorphous world at the end of a computer chirping digital zeros and ones into servers around the world. The line is a direct digital connection between users on the autobahn of information nix autobahn and replace that with space shuttle. We ve all seen those TV commercials where the kid is rushed to the emergency room in the hinterland and an X-ray is sent to a specialist in a modern, urban center hundreds of miles away, where the image can be seen within seconds. That s what we re talking about. This is going to give us some bandwidth that we ve never had before, so it is going to open up some opportunities for us to exchange electronic health records, not only locally, but a further reach than what we are currently doing now, said Mike Di Pasquale, information technology director for Spooner Health System (SHS), which in 2009 was named one of top 100 Wired Hospitals in America. SHS is one of the most technologically advanced small hospitals in the country, and the fiber optic line would allow the hospital to transmit using a more reliable, fast, secure method. Di Pasquale is one of four local information technology (IT) specialists who gathered recently to discuss what the new fiber optics line will mean to the area. The specialists included Hugh Miller, district technology coordinator, Spooner Area School District; Thomas Miller, director of Washburn County s information technology; and Tim Maki, technical operations manager of Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College (WITC) administrative office. In March 2009, Washburn County Board supervisors voted to contribute $125,000, along with contributions from Spooner Area School District, Spooner Health System, city of Spooner, and Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College, to help secure a $ million Broadband Technology Opportunity Program (BTOP) grant for the state s initiative called Building

2 Community Capacity through Broadband (BCCB). The project would extend a fiber optic backbone through the state and locally for government and participating non-profit agencies. Hugh Miller said local public and non-profit entities who collaborated heard about the grant just weeks prior to the deadline and acted quickly. This month environmental surveys are being conducted along proposed routes. In the proposed design, a spur will follow Cty. Hwy. B to Shell Lake, and two spurs will enter Spooner, along Hwy. 70 on the south and Cty. Hwy. A/H on the north. Originally, one spur was to come off Cty. Hwy. A/H and make a beeline to the high school, but then the Wisconsin Department of Transportation requested access to the Spooner State Patrol office, and the Hwy. 70 spur was proposed. The four IT specialists were not gathering just to share their enthusiasm but to work out the details of a Community Area Network (CAN), a cooperative work group to manage the fiber optics line in Shell Lake and Spooner. The four are modeling the local CAN on an Eau Claire/Chippewa Valley CAN, a collection of non-profits, governments, hospitals and schools that have managed and maintained a jointly owned fiber optic line for more than a decade. Possibilities At the forefront of the technology curve, the fiber optic line will allow Spooner Health System to send out x-ray images, which currently are transmitted as far as St. Paul, Minn., but send those images faster and on a more reliable medium. So from a health-field perspective, it is going to open up a brand new field for us and give us some opportunities that we just haven t had before, said Di Pasquale. You need a fast mode of transportation to exchange images and the images take a lot of bandwidth. This isn t to replace the Internet, said Thomas Miller. This will be a fiber connection between entities, for example the Spooner hospital to Eau Claire hospital, so your data doesn t touch the Internet. The four IT specialists say the line will not make Washburn County another Silicon Valley, but it is a major piece of catch-up. It helps us take advantage of opportunities we just can t do right now, said Thomas Miller. Once this network is in place, the opportunities will present themselves, and all you have to do is connect to it, and there is no ongoing recurring cost. An example of a possibility that having the fiber optic line in the CINC created is a kiosk at a cemetery that allows visitors to search for gravesites.

3 Thomas Miller said the line could allow the Washburn County Highway Department to position cameras along Hwy. 53 to monitor snow accumulation on roads or focus a camera for first responders at an intersection such as Hwys. 63/53. Tourism agencies could create a feed to a computer kiosk at the Veterans Wayside along with wireless access for tourists, and a wireless system could come off the line that would allow county dispatch to download large files to officers in patrol cars. From a school standpoint, said Hugh Miller, the broadband allows us to do high-definition (HD) video conferencing and distance learning. We ll be able to do a better job. Maki is imagining already how education will change for WITC with the new line. It hits three of our campuses Rice Lake, our Shell Lake district office, and all the way up to Superior, said Maki. We ll have a straight fiber link; we ll be able to do a better preparation for disaster recovery and HD video. Right now we may have students in Superior who want to take a class, but we might not have an instructor in Superior. Using HD video, virtual desktops and things like that on the PC [personal computer] side, it is kind of opening up a whole new area to enhance our current courses and offer more high-tech classes in different areas around our district without having students travel or relocate. Hugh Miller said the fiber optic line will provide opportunities for schools to coordinate and share resources. It will open doors for conversations that will start happening between Rice Lake, Chetek, and Spooner schools, he said. We are all hoping to be able to share this in a way we may manage all our desktop computers as a consortium of school districts in the future, which wouldn t be even remotely possible right now. In other words there might be one big room somewhere where the kids log onto and pull down in Spooner what is being managed jointly with the idea of better service and shared cost and the idea of backing up data off-site. It is even the idea of doing video conferencing, said Hugh Miller. I might sit here and meet with my counterparts through the Heart of the North [conference schools] or something like that and never have to leave or travel, and you start building that over a lot of different things, and you start to see the savings in time and travel and being productive. Economic development The line could be a boon to economic development. It will open up the door of opportunity locally for a lot of businesses, said Maki. One of the questions a lot of businesses ask before coming to a small community is, What kind of bandwidth do you have? We have a lot of information here we have to exchange. If you don t have bandwidth, they don t come here. We are going to have that bandwidth, though. Maki said if an entrepreneur wants to create a call center locally, the bandwidth would be available.

4 Details of how businesses could access the broadband line have not been decided and need to be worked out. The four men want the community to know that access to the line is not just limited to those who came up with the seed money. What happens if someone comes in who wasn t in at the ground floor? said Hugh Miller. The idea is everyone is bringing to the table what they have for resources, and you are sort of pulling it together, and you re saying, What can we do? What is in the best interest for everybody? and not try to shut anyone out or anything. It will allow us to do things we just couldn t do on our own and do it in a way that benefits the community as a whole. Preparing Right now I have five buildings, and we lease fiber from a vendor that is going to be replaced with this fiber, said Thomas Miller, so I am looking at what kind of hardware we will need and what I am going to do with our phone system. Right now, I don t have to purchase hardware, yet. We are not even there yet in terms of what we need for hardware, said Di Pasquale, but we are still in the thought process, too. The hospital is the same way [as the county]. We are looking at our current vendors and looking at what we need to do with the new fiber. We are planning for it, but we are not really totally on board with it yet. The school is pretty much in the same boat, said Hugh Miller. When it falls into place, we will be able to look at what we have to do to shift things over to take advantage of it from voice and data to how it is going to affect replacing computers and planning for the future the idea of the virtual desktop is an example. We are dreaming up all the things we are going to be doing, but same thing we haven t purchased any hardware for WITC, Maki said. What we will initially do is start by testing the fiber and make sure all our services are working. We are looking at doing that next summer when school is out. By the fall [2012] if we could have the infrastructure in place. Cost Buying adequate bandwidth can be an expensive proposition, and the new fiber optic line could mean big savings for those connected. Thomas Miller said the county currently buys 10 megs of bandwidth for about $40,000, and he believes the new line will help save a big chunk of that. In the CINC, members contribute $2,500 a year for the line s maintenance. It will be something like that, said Thomas Miller. It will be very affordable.

5 Hugh Miller said the school could recoup its investment cost in a couple of years. Eight years ago we thought three meg was pretty great, and then it was 10 meg, and then it was 50, and now we are at 100, and it s changing. In the case of the school, we have more and more kids and more and more teachers who are doing things that are pulling and pushing stuff via the Internet, video, audio, interactive-type learning things, and the demand keeps growing for a lot of reasons, but we will be able to meet demand without significantly increasing cost, and I don t speculate what it is going to be, but it won t be a substantial increase. If anything, it should flatten out or decrease. Obsolete by wireless? A criticism of the line raised at county meetings is that wireless technology made available by private vendors could make the line obsolete. The four IT specialists disagree. Fiber is for speed and reliability and security, said Thomas Miller. The big thing with this fiber, it goes directly to hospital to hospital, the public health department to the hospital, you are not sending your stuff through the public Internet. You still need your Internet service, but this allows us to got independent of the Internet at bandwidths. The other piece of it is that wireless goes to a tower somewhere and that tower is still hardwired back into the network the wireless is connected to, said Hugh Miller. Another criticism is that the line removes competition from private suppliers. The four said private vendors cannot always offer the bandwidth needed to meet the needs of hospitals, counties and schools. If they can, it becomes cost-prohibitive to purchase. The four said fiber optic allows users to implement high bandwidth services within tight budgets, and that will benefit and improve the quality of healthcare and education for Washburn County and other communities along the line s path. Thomas Miller said CINC members continue to work with private bandwidth companies. It is not a competition with the privates, he said, because in the end, you are working together.