|
Mobile & Wireless
Business Case in Point
CTIA 2009: SGRITA wants to close Georgia’s bandwidth gap
Sets focus on extending service to rural areas
by Sean Buckley
With all of the ongoing hype around the Obama administration’s $7.2 billion broadband stimulus bill, it is refreshing to see that some states such as Georgia are taking action today.
Georgia does have a powerful broadband ally on its side: governor Sonny Perdue. Calling broadband “the new dial tone for the 21st century,” Perdue has been extending the availability of funding to local communities to build out new broadband network infrastructure.
Following in the footsteps of earlier efforts by Georgia’s Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District, SGRITA (Southern Georgia Regional Information Technology Authority) is building out a microwave backbone network that extends a 212-mile line-of-sight microwave wireless ring with DragonWave licensed radios throughout the five counties it serves.
Funded through a grant from the OneGeorgia Authority’s Broadband Rural Initiative to Develop Georgia’s Economy (BRIDGE), SGRITA will serve five counties in southern Georgia (Baker, Calhoun, Early, Miller and Mitchell).
Working as the liaison between SGRITA and OneGeorgia is Civitium, a consulting firm that can provide technical oversight to ensure the project runs on time and on budget.
For example, many of the early proposals to build out wireless broadband networks for southwest Georgia were based on unlicensed networks, but One Georgia wanted something more carrier-class. Civitium found that DragonWave was the best vendor to serve SGRITA's needs.
In building this network, SGRITA hopes to attract new businesses wanting to expand into an area where broadband access was limited or nonexistent.
Initially connecting four school districts (12 school buildings in total), Dustin Springman, Network Operations Manager for SGRITA, says that “the incumbents and CLECs in the area can’t compete at this time.”
Of course, SGRITA did appeal to the local ILEC for interconnection facilities, but it found out that the ILEC’s offering fell short of what they needed. Not surprisingly, the southern Georgia-area ILEC (AT&T) did not have the capabilities to suit SGRITA’s needs. To meet SGRITA's needs, the ILEC would have had to engage in a long build out process.
But the incumbents' lack of bandwidth did not stop SGRITA from moving forward.
“When we were staging this backbone, and we were trying to find upstream bandwidth providers to connect to, the ILECs in this area could not support what we required,” Springman said. “They said they would have to bring in additional facilities just to serve us so we went to other partner companies and got our uplinks that way.”
Rapid ramp up
Initially targeting education and state and local government agencies, SGRITA’s network is being built in three phases.
A major challenge in leveraging fiber technology was the geography of the areas SGRITA would serve. Because SGRITA wanted to get its network up quickly with minimal cost, SGRITA felt licensed wireless was the best route.
“One of the big key reasons we chose microwave was that we needed to deploy quickly and we have 200 end-to-end direct line-of-site miles,” Springman said. “The geographic area and the rural nature of our region made it cost-prohibitive to run fiber now.”
Since launching the initiative just eight months ago with a staff of two people, SGRITA has deployed radios in 19 towers. This deployment does not include the radios that go into the other ten water towers that are used for public works and government agencies.
And unlike the much ballyhooed open access network deployments that struggled to get off the ground in other states, SGRITA is showing a profit. In just this quarter alone, the operator signed contracts and increased its revenue to $1.5 million.
Despite the initial focus on microwave, SGRITA is not ruling out fiber altogether.
In fact, the operator plans to run fiber to further interconnect the school buildings it serves, while supplementing its current microwave backbone.
Unlike the deployment of fiber, which requires trenching and other related permit and construction costs, leveraging microwave enabled SGRITA sidestep those issues in constructing the network.
“In three months, we had an entire carrier-grade network that was fully functional and delivering services to these schools that had previously been on bonded T1s,” Springman said. “That’s really why we chose microwave as a mechanism to build, get deployed quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.”
Springman added that it will add fiber as needed to its network, but microwave will always have a prominent role. “The radios we’re using now are going to be used for redundancy or they’re going to be recycled and move them around to other parts of the region.”
All of this network build out was achieved in a challenging environment. Southern Georgia’s climate can sometimes have 100 percent humidity, while its proximity near the Gulf of Mexico brings daily thunderstorms.
Through the radio’s incorporation of adaptive modulation techniques, SGRITA was able to maintain uptime during these events.
As it looks forward to the second phase of its project, SGRITA is evaluating various broadband wireless frequency bands including 3.65 GHz, 2.5 GHz as well as 700 MHz wireless bands.
Not wanting to put the cart before the horse, Jason Shannon, CTO of Civitium, said that it was essential to have the backbone network done first.
Although many of the proposals presented to OneGeorgia talked about how a provider could extend a new access networks to the home, but before that’s even considered, the question was how it could get across 2000 square miles to distribute capacity.
“It certainly makes things a lot easier to address,” Shannon said. “Typically, delivering residential services in a rural environment is hard to do, and it becomes much easier when you have almost 30 facilities on the ground.”
Closing the education gap
Amidst all of the rhetoric from the US government on how states need to transform education, SGRITA is putting a plan to action.
Now that the first phase of the network deployment is well underway, SGRITA will begin the phase two, which focusesd on extending underserved an unserved areas in Southern Georgia with broadband access.
“Right now, the small towns have some DSL, but the only other option they have is satellite,” Springman said. “We have a little bit more of a social agenda versus a for-profit type of company because every bit of funding we get gets recycled into the program in serving the schools, but serving every child that goes to those schools.”
Yet even with all of this bandwidth going to the schools, SGRITA realizes it has to correct the unavoidable disconnect between the schools and students' homes.
While the schools were getting faster connections for new applications such as distance learning, the reality is that when the students were saddled with nothing more than dial-up connection at their homes.
“Probably the number one complaint we have out here in this area is that the schools are speeding up with digital content and distance learning, but the kids that go home and have dial-up can’t participate at that level,” Springman said. “We’re basically trying to bring this region up to speed holistically instead of just cherry picking the big industries in this area.”
On average, SGRITA is delivering 20-30 Mbps to each area school building as their subscribed service. These connections are then complemented by a 200 Mbps leased line replacement WAN interconnection service.
Prior to the SGRITA microwave network, area schools typically had little more than bonded 1-2 T1 (1.5 Mbps) connections.
Before connecting area schools to the network, they were in the bottom 8 percent in terms of access capacity in comparison to the rest of the country. Now, they claim to be in the top 1 percent in terms of speed and access.
“When you get out here and get involved with people in this community, it’s kind of unnerving they have been so disconnected from the rest of the world for so long,” Springman said. “They thought that a couple of bonded T1s they had at the schools that were saturated 100 percent of the day was great Internet.”
Broadband to the farmer
Serving education, local government and residents may be the initial drive for SGRITA, but since the areas it serves are agriculture-based, the target in the third phase of its project will be area farmers.
One town that resides in SGRITA territory is Blakely, Georgia, the town where the Peanut Corp. of America was said to have violated various FDA rules and possibly caused a salmonella outbreak.
SGRITA would like to extend telemetry services to farmers off the broadband wireless backbone network. Farmers would then be able to use the telemetry service to conduct remote monitoring of their food quality inspection systems. These services would likely incorporate sensors at these remote sites and user video systems.
As compelling as it would be to serve this industry segment, Springman says that it’s a very costly endeavor.
“This is a very integral part of SGRITA, but it’s also the most expensive with the least return,” he said.
Although the costs to extend the broadband network to farmers could be steep, SGRITA believes it will eventually bring services to farmers.
Instead, if it can continue to attract local schools and businesses to its network, it can leverage that revenue in combination with other grant funding to focus on systems that could ensure the health of its local residents and potentially the world.
Of course, the most important thing is to makeing the network and services meet long-term goals.
“At the end of the day, this is a self-sustaining business,” Springman said. “That’s one of the reasons why OneGeorgia graced us with this project and one of the key missions for, Civitium making sure what we’re doing will be sustainable for 10, 15 even 25 years.”
|
