An expressway to the information superhighway might come to Spokane within a year.


An Eastern Washington consortium wants to light up an extremely high-speed, large-bandwidth fiber-optic network between Spokane and Seattle and establish a high-speed information distribution hub here, says Garv Brakel, director of management information services at the city of Spokane, which is organizing the consortium.


Such a network would connect Spokane to the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, a telecommunications hub thats operated by the University of Washington, and link the Spokane area to other high-speed networkssome of which Brakel refers to as next-generation Internetnationally and internationally.


The city is requesting $5 million over the next five years from the Washington Legislature to build the network between Spokane and UWs Gigapop and to operate an Eastern Washington Gigapop distribution hub, which could come online within a year.


Such gigapop connections largely are used for educational and research endeavors, out of which startup companies can be spun out. Also, advocates say, with such a network the Spokane area could market itself as an information-backup hub for large high-tech concerns on the West Side, since the Spokane area is relatively more geographically secure than the Puget Sound area.


The Eastern Washington Gigapop Consortium, which includes a mix of high-tech businesses and Spokane-area universities, colleges, and other schools, estimates that 2,000 new jobs in high tech, biotech, and biosciences could be created here over the next five years if the high-speed, high-bandwidth connection is established. Brakel says the job estimate came from a university professor.


Such a high-speed connection would move information at a speed of at least 10 gigabits a second, Brakel says.


Thats roughly 400,000 times faster than with a conventional 56k-modem connection, he says.


Greg Green, chairman and CEO of Spokane-based One Eighty Networks Inc., says that company currently offers Internet connections as fast as 1 gigabit a second, which he says might be the fastest connection currently offered here.


Green says One Eighty supports creation of a gigapop here, but he doesnt believe that businesses here currently would benefit from the additional speed or bandwidthor that the technology would compel businesses to relocate here.


The businesses here dont have the demand or needs where they are going to notice a difference today, Green says. In the research area and the U-District, thats where youll have the need, and thats where the value will come in.


Jerry Johnson, director of IP services at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, in Richland, Wash., says PNNL is advocating the Seattle-Spokane connection.


The lab plans to light up a 60-gigabit-a-second connection between Tri-Cities and Seattle before long that will allow it to send and receive information dramatically faster than it can now.


Were moving from a two-lane road to a 48-lane highway, Johnson says.


If a Spokane-Seattle high-speed connection is put in place, PNNL will push for establishment of a Spokane-Tri-Cities link to create an alternate high-speed route for both communities.


Without that link, either markets individual connection to Seattle could be rendered useless if damaged or severed somehow, Johnson says. He says a Tri-Cities-Spokane line also would allow those communities to communicate somewhat faster, though if both were hooked into the Pacific Northwest Gigapop, theyd be able to communicate with each other exponentially faster than they can now.