Spokane Boasts Model Gigabit Network

by Chris McManes

In March, IEEE-USA called for the United States to deploy widespread wired and wireless gigabit networks as a national priority. The call attracted the attention of officials from Spokane, Wash., which has already adopted this strategy on a municipal level and can serve as a model for other U.S. cities.

“As we move into this information age, and we’re well into it, we need to stay ahead,” Spokane Mayor James West said in an April interview. “IEEE-USA’s efforts nationally will help the entire country stay cutting edge. Locally, that will also help us make our case with our citizens and our legislature. And we get to use the information.

“Our colleges will be stronger, our kids will be stronger, and our communities will be stronger.”

IEEE-USA’s white paper, Providing Ubiquitous Gigabit Networks in the United States, from its Committee on Communications and Information Policy (CCIP), says that the nation must act promptly to ensure that a new generation of broadband networks — of gigabit per second speed — is ubiquitous and available to all. Failure to act will “relegate the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to an inferior competitive position” and undermine the future of the U.S. economy.

“Priority deployment of gigabit networks is essential for the United States to maintain its world leadership in the knowledge economy,” IEEE Life Fellow and IEEE-USA CCIP member Dr. John Richardson said. “Information drives our lives and our prosperity. The problem is that current networks aren’t fast enough to distribute that information properly.”

Broadband speed is not a problem in Spokane, an eastern Washington city of about 197,000 in a metro area of 400,000. The city has more miles of high-speed fiber per capita than any other U.S. city. And its reliable, high-speed network is not limited to the wired world. The city launched the nation’s largest municipal wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) network (SpokaneHotZone) in its central business district last summer. This provides users free wireless Internet access for two hours a day through the zone’s broadband provider.

Hoop Dreams Provided Catalyst

The SpokaneHotZone was initiated in 2003 during the city’s annual — and world’s largest — 3-on-3 basketball tournament. With 6,000 teams from around the world playing 25,000 games throughout the city, scheduling and score reporting was arduous when done on paper. So someone proposed placing a Wi-Fi transmitter on top of city hall, allowing scoring, scheduling and statistics management to be done online. Spectators and players loved the system, and afterwards city officials noticed that people were still tapping into the wireless antenna and logging on to the Internet.

Spokane soon realized how beneficial such a wireless system would be to its mobile workforce, including police officers, fire fighters and others. A public and private partnership emerged and the 100-block SpokaneHotZone was born.

“I was pleased to hear about the public-private partnerships that the city has successfully implemented,” Richardson said. “The idea of hot zones covering major parts of a city is an idea whose time has come.”

By the end of next year, Spokane will be linked with Seattle, Pullman, Wash., and Boise, Idaho, among other cities, through the Pacific Northwest Gigapop (“gigabit point-of-presence”). While current bandwidth between Seattle and Spokane, for example, is 155Mbps, this high-speed Ethernet link (dubbed “Gigapop2”) will increase bandwidth to 10Gbps. (A megabit is one million bits; a gigabit is one billion bits.)

The potential benefits of such a high-speed cyber infrastructure to government, industry and academia are enormous. Spokane’s Gigapop2 network is being paid for with $1 million from the state government.

“Gigapop2 will vastly increase our bandwidth and speed, linking Spokane to the nation and the world,” West said in his January 2005 State of the City address. “It will significantly advance research and technology, education and health care, and economic development.”

Spokane’s Terabyte Triangle provides fiber throughout downtown into more than 100 buildings, making older buildings wired for business today.

“Those kind of things deliver on the promise that we were all given many years ago, that you could be in a small community and work in a big community,” West said. “You could have all the benefits of being in rural America and having a comfortable lifestyle, while at the same time being employed by a multi-national corporation.”

West also wants to take advantage of Spokane’s geographic location, which is free of volcanoes, major earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados, to promote the city as an ideal location for a West Coast data storage center.

“We’re out there in a nice, comfortable area and people could move their back-up data to Spokane over high-speed broadband, store it there and be secure,” he said. “We have several companies now going into that business and selling to our West Coast friends to store their data. The state of Washington just put one of their back-up centers in Spokane.

“We’re 300 miles from Seattle, so we have a real advantage of being just far enough away that we’re safe, but close enough that if a corporation needs to send some employees to a temporary location that use their data, they can get there fairly easy.”

The Spokane School District deploys dark fiber to each of its schools and community colleges. The 10/1000 Mbps Ethernet connection can easily be upgraded to gigabit speeds for a small, one-time upgrade charge.

West agrees with IEEE-USA that the entire nation should be linked through gigabit networks. He likened it to the westward expansion of the railroad, the building of the Panama Canal and the construction of the Interstate highway system.

“Each of these projects was done for military purposes, but did huge things for the American economy,” he said. “I see the deployment of broadband into every community having not just commercial benefits, but also defense-related and education-related benefits.”

In a position adopted in June, IEEE-USA advocates establishing a National Health Information Network (NHIN) to take advantage of cutting-edge networking technologies and provide secure and reliable shared access to health information. Once again, Spokane is out in front with the Inland Northwest Health Services (INHS). This nonprofit corporation’s Information Resource Management (IRM) health information network provides integrated information systems to Spokane hospitals, physicians offices, imaging companies, pharmacies and the region’s health care community, enabling those groups to share patient medical information.

IRM stores approximately 2.6 million patient records and is used by more than 30 health care agencies in Washington and Idaho. Clinical applications include electronic storage and distribution of radiology images and lab results, access to patient information on a personal digital assistant, and electronic pharmacy review and monitoring, among other things. The telehealth network also provides online insurance eligibility, patient registration and appointment scheduling.

In Spokane, INHS has a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) that uses gigabit Ethernet with a fiber ring. The Wide Area Network (WAN), which serves rural areas, connects through INHS to the MAN. Each hospital has a Local Area Network (LAN) that also connects to the MAN, making Spokane’s hospitals among the most wired in the world. As a dedicated network, it is unified, secure and stable.

Through the work of its Medical Technology Policy Committee, IEEE-USA believes that an NHIN could reduce medical errors resulting from insufficient information regarding a patient’s history, prescribed medications and current condition; provide fast access to health data in an emergency situation; and curb rising health care costs by eliminating much of the paper-based processing of patient records and insurance claims.

Rep. Nancy Johnson (R-Conn.), chair of the House Health Subcommittee of the Ways and Means Committee, said that, “greater use of IT can dramatically improve the safety and quality of our health care system while also reducing costs. I am encouraged that (the Department of Health and Human Services) is moving forward to adopt health IT, and Congress wants to work with the administration to shape the final product.

“I believe that a public-private approach appropriately recognizes the key roles that both the government and the private sector play in the critical area of health IT.”

Chris McManes is IEEE-USA's senior public relations coordinator in Washington, D.C. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.