The city of Cheney expects early next month to hire a contractor to design the backbone of a high-capacity fiber-optic network that eventually could bring broadband computer and telecommunications lines to its 4,000 utility customers, including residents, businesses, and the Eastern Washington University campus.


In the action, the Cheney City Council plans to award a $10,000 contract for the design of a fiber-optic network that initially would connect city-owned facilities and offices. The network later could serve as the backbone, or central system, for what could become one of the few municipally owned, communitywide, fiber-optic networks in the nation, says Paul Schmidt, Cheney city administrator.


The city of Cheney already operates its own electric utility, which would provide it with the right of way needed for the proposed fiber-optic network.


Such a network would give each utility customer access to up to 100 megabits-per-second of bandwidthor roughly 2,000 times the data-carrying speed available with a standard telephone line and modem, says Schmidt. Because the city wouldnt need for its own purposes all the network capacity the backbone would provide, it envisions leasing some of that capacity to commercial content providers, such as cable companies and telecommunications providers, he says.


Were not looking at taking over for the content providers, he says of the citys interest in developing the fiber-optic network. Were just supplying the pipe, if you will.


The city already has begun routinely installing conduit for fiber-optic cable as it installs and replaces its utility service trunk lines, Schmidt says, and it envisions using the fiber-optic network for such purposes as reading residents utility meters remotely, once fiber-optic lines have been extended to individual homes and commercial buildings. If all buildings in the city were connected with fiber-optic lines, users could communicate with one another via a metropolitan network or over the Internet at speeds much faster than even DSL connections provide, he says. That much capacity would allow users with the right equipment to, for instance, participate in a video-telephone conference while at the same time downloading a feature-length movie in a matter of minutes, says Dan Stutzke, co-owner of CSK Communications Inc., a Spokane fiber-optic consulting firm.


In fact, Stutzke says, the capacity of such a fiber-optic connection is essentially infinite, for all intents and purposes, and really is limited only by the type of electronic components connected on either end.


The next step the city of Cheney plans to pursue in establishing a fiber network is to seek a grant of up to $50,000 from the U.S. Department of Commerces Office of Technology Policy that would be used to study the scope and economic feasibility of the overall project. The Cheney City Council recently gave city officials approval to write a grant application, which now is being prepared with assistance from EWUs Institute for Public Policy and Economic Analysis.


The study, among other things, would determine how much the project would cost, and where the city could seek funding to pay for it. Schmidt says the citywide installation of the fiber-optic cable alone likely would cost more than $10 million. The study will explore additional grant funding, the possible underwriting of costs by technology and equipment providers on a pilot- or demonstration-program basis, and the generation of revenues from content providers, among other potential sources of funding.


Another likely contributor would be EWU. Schmidt says discussions of a possible collaboration between EWU and the city on the installation of a municipal fiber-optic network began last year.


The university sees considerable need for such a network, he says, particularly in light of its plans to construct a new building for its School of Computing and Engineering Sciences, as well as the recent selection of its campus as the site of both the planned Eastern Washington Regional Archives and Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory.


The grant-funded study also would attempt to assess the level of interest in the project among both potential subscribers and content providers, he says.


If Cheney succeeds in the plan, says CSKs Stutzke, it would be among the very few municipal governments in the nation to operate such a network.


Most of the installed fiber is city to city, he says. Some connections are business to business, but very few are residence to residence.


There is reason to believe, however, that the city of Cheney might be uniquely suited to the development of such a fiber-optic network, Schmidt says.


The beauty of Cheney is that its small and compact, he says. We have a huge user potentially in Eastern Washington University, which helps make it cost effective. We have one of the highest per capita rates of computer literacy in the state. We have our own right of way and our own electrical systema lot of amenities going for us that others dont.


Another publicly owned entity, Grant County PUD, began connecting more than 150 residences and businesses in Ephrata and Moses Lake to a fiber-optic network under a pilot program last year.