Sometimes, you can get in groove where you think you're pretty much up to any task, and can rest your skill sharpening for a bit. I call it the "Superman Syndrome", and it’s a very dangerous place to rest. A few years ago, I took on a project that literally turned my hair grey with its complexity - the Modesto INET. I had come off a string of successful projects across the west coast including the San Diego Padres Ballpark District design, and a string of Class C to Biomed Office Park conversions in Washington State. I was asked to get the negotiations completed and a fiber project from a stall point to completion. Without asking many questions, I jumped at the assignment. What I did not know at the time was by the time it was completed it would include 156 miles of fiber, interconnecting 115 sites, trenched through the streets of a busy metropolitan area, to multiple organizations outside of the organizational and political control.
For 25 years, Modesto had utilized a coax/copper based infrastructure that was a combination of bandwidth from the cable franchise agreement and direct contracts with the local telecommunications provider. While this had served its purpose, it was no longer sufficient to maintain the operational needs nor did it allow us to move forward. Worse, it allowed no interconnectivity with the partners in the local schools, universities, first responders and other government agencies.
Even though the "telecom-revolution" of the last 1990’s had cooled down, internet use and capabilities continued to advance, in fact were still growing dramatically. Combined with the increasingly digital nature of federal, state and local governments, the problem became evident - the City was running out of "digital-capacity". At that point, we had a few options:
1. Contract with the telecommunication carriers for additional copper-based high-capacity lines
2. Lease fiber-optic lines from the telecommunication carrier
3. Build out the own fiber infrastructure
The first two options increased the City's costs dramatically, and offered no other advantages over the existing system. Normally, the third option, running the own fiber, would be cost prohibitive ($20 million). Fortunately, as part of the cable TV franchise agreement, we negotiated with Comcast the right to have fiber optics run between all of the city sites for a fraction of the cost to run it themselves. Although investing in their own fiber based infrastructure was fiscally prudent, (AT&T hates me now) its advantages were the "real story".
This type of agreement has been done in other cities across the county; however, what differentiated this was the ambitious and inclusive nature of this undertaking. The scale of build was daunting - 156 miles of fiber, interconnecting 115 sites, trenched through the streets of a busy metropolitan area, to multiple organizations outside of the organizational and political control.
The system, completed under budget in less than 10 months, interconnects six-strands of single-mode fiber to each of the115 sites - including the local school districts’, public safety agencies, the County emergency operations center, local universities and community colleges and the local television broadcast center. The local schools now interconnect all their schools to the district offices as well as the local interconnect to the state office of education. They are taking advantage of this stable robust platform to use VoIP technologies.
The Public safety agencies now use the system to video conference all stations for daily briefings, remote training and emergency situations. The City’s 38 sites are now connected and are supported remotely for technical support, remote helpdesk, application deployment and other unique services that thrive on high bandwidth connectivity.
Wireless deployment is now spreading throughout the city, as the high availability of backhaul locations allows for the rapid deployment of Wi-Fi access points, spreading the mobile workforce initiatives
Basically, the entire City of Modesto and its educational partners operated as if they are on a single LAN, leaving the limits of this network to the imagination.
One of the most innovative aspects to this project lay not in its technology – as fiber optic connectivity with video/voice/data aspects are rapidly becoming standard fare in the “IT World”. What was innovative was the approach –we took a very private sector, collaborative approach to a government problem, ignoring all of the traditional landmines and obstacles to intra-agency projects.
Politically, we had to deal with the reality of working with the IT Departments, agency leaders, school principals, superintendents, and elected officials of multiple organizations. They meant gaining credibility through open meetings, where the intent and inherent opportunities of this project were discussed openly and candidly. Since the project required the outside agencies to fund their part of the fiber build, detailed design aspects such as exact street/alley routing had to be provided, and we had to have the patience and openness to redesign the 156 mile network literally to the street level in order to accommodate the actual or perceived cost savings to the new potential partners.
Helping the agencies understand this projects economy of scale, their individual business cases and work through prior issues that had occurred sometimes decades in the past (which has created an initial distrustful backdrop in some cases) took in some cases, dozens of meetings.
Once the technical and business aspects were approved by all agencies, we had to present and convince multiple elected bodies about a very technical subject, with a high up-front cost ($1.5 million to one participant), during lean budget times. Once that was complete, we had to project manage a 156-mile fiber build through a busy metropolitan area with multiple stakeholders, vendors, contractors and subcontractors. The project was complete in 10 months, and as of now all the agencies are reaping the benefits of the system, finding new ways to leverage this technology (and their investment).
A few of the benefits and uses of this new system:
Connecting the Government
Modesto's government is much more that 10th Street Place. Spread across the City are Fire Department stations, Police offices, senior citizens centers, recreation facilities, and smaller remote offices that provide basic city services of almost every type. After the fiber, all of these offices are connected with high-speed, secure connections allowing citizens to receive better service across the City.
Reducing the cost of government
It's no secret that it takes money to run a city. Another advantage to the INET is that it strikes in the middle of a significant budget item, telecommunications. Imagine being able to disconnect over 400 telephone lines and another 85 digital service connections - we are able to do just that
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If your interested in gruesome details, I have a PowerPoint you can download that I presented to a Project Managers International meeting a while back. Just right click on the graphic and save to your drive (Its big). |
Connecting the Police Department
A recent high-profile case and even popular television shows indicate police work is now an extremely high-tech environment. Combine this fact with the "officer-driver, officer-centric" philosophy of the Modesto Police Department, and it is easy to imagine the benefits that a connected department offers.
Traditional requirements such as viewing "mug-shots" and lineups have become technological in nature, however, due to bandwidth constraints, these tasks were performed only at the Main Office. Now that the City is connected via fiber, Officers are able to conduct administrative and investigative duties across the City at the various remote offices. High profile programs such as the Megan's Law and Amber alert systems have also become more effective. Finally, the general support for the field offices is more efficient and responsive as computers and peripherals can be centrally managed.
Connecting the Fire Department
Among the greatest threats to any city is that of fire. Modesto puts a high priority in staffing and providing the Fire Department with the tools it requires to keep us safe. Part of the requirements of a responsive, professional department is training. Every time centralized training occurs, the remote fire stations lose staff required for a quick response to fires.
With the INET, the department conducts 2-way broadcast training sessions on a daily basis without having to remove firefighters from their stations. Additionally, these training sessions can be stored digitally for "on-demand" viewing at a later time allowing training sessions to occur 24/7. Because of the ability to digitally store events - the public will be able to view educational sessions from the Fire Departments’ website such as CPR training, home fire safety, etc.
Unfortunately the events of 911 have demonstrated that it can be a dangerous world. The INET allows the City to maintain a highly secure, independent communications backbone that allows voice and data communications even in the event of service outages.
Connecting the schools
The partners include the Modesto City Schools, Stanislaus County Office of Education, and the Sylvan School District. With this fiber optic system in place, every one of the schools and the administrative buildings are connected to each other at almost instantaneous speeds, opening the doors to an almost infinite amount of possibilities for the future of technology.
Some of the initial uses of this technology are to share internet access among all of the schools’ networks and to have a centralized network to share files and information among schools, teachers, and students. There are also other uses that can be seen as well, such as the use of IP phones. These network phones use this fiber optic system for inter-district phone calls eliminating the need for many of the districts’ phone lines. Many other uses are remote surveillance cameras and sensors. This allows security to monitor what is happening in all of the schools from one location. This would also allow emergency personnel, such as fire fighters, to see what is happening and where in the building before they enter it.
With all these uses and many others not yet imagined, the fiber optic system allows the district decades of expansion and use.
The bottom line is that we took the power of government resources and used them in very non-traditional, entrepreneur ways, which focused on cost-savings and inter-agency cooperation. Many of these projects are a dream, but we actually got it done. We had the tenacity and contagious belief that this was an opportunity to leverage a basic cable-franchise agreement into something that benefited and reduced the costs of the entire region, across non-traditional barriers. In regards to technology, having a 156 mile network connected with GB Ethernet has additional uses, which could fill volumes to describe.
If you’re interested in gruesome details, I have a PowerPoint you can download that I presented to a Project Managers International meeting a while back. Just right click on the graphic and save to your drive (It’s big).
