MuniWireless

About Grande Prairie

The fabric of this community which is located 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, Alberta is a fusion of pioneer spirit and new energy fuelled by rapid growth. Grande Prairie’s population grew by almost 30 per cent over the five years before the 2006 federal census, which recorded this city as the second fastest growing in Alberta. This growth put Grande Prairie third among mid-sized urban centres in Canada. The municipal census during 2007 verified that the population has surpassed the 50,000 resident mark. With about three quarters of the residents under the age of 45, Grande Prairie is a vibrant community where people are eager to see the municipality progress even further.

The local economy is driven by oil and gas, forestry, agriculture, and its location as the regional retail centre for about 250,000 area residents. Grande Prairie is also the hub for government in north western Alberta.

Grande Prairie is a Smart City, with a modern and technologically advanced infrastructure to meet the demands of a growing, dynamic community. Partnerships with other municipalities and public and private agencies accelerate the City’s progress in the information age and create tremendous economic development opportunities and growth.

The Situation and Guiding Principles

The municipality of Grande Prairie continually strives to improve efficiency in delivery of its services and enhance the use of applications by its various agencies such as fire department, public works, assessment, inspections and the regional utilities corporation. The City looks at new technologies as a means to improve the delivery of such services by utilizing Geographic Information Systems (GIS), work order, inspection and building assessment systems. In addition, it has faced an increasing young and tech savvy population with an entrepreneurial attitude that has become a driving force in the City’s economic growth.

The above business and demographic environment puts pressure on the City to seek ways to extend these services to a growing community including new and remote facilities and offices, using a wireless technology platform. For this purpose, the City decided to conduct a feasibility study for a citywide community broadband wireless network in conjunction with KAZAM Technologies – a management consulting firm specialized in wireless and broadband communications.

The City had been previously approached by the vendor community to gain access to rights of way for its facilities and buildings. However, there were concerns vendors would look at their own business case without taking into consideration the needs of the City, whereas the City was looking at the use of technology to serve the interests of the larger community.

In addition to the delivery of enhanced services, the use of wireless broadband was seen as an economic development tool and a guiding principle for providing better services to the community. A good example of such guiding principles was the CyberCity initiative – a project undertaken in 1996 to provide fiber services to the community and businesses as part of the development of a Smart community. Other principles guiding the City in its wireless project included:
•    High aspirations: The City of Grande Prairie wanted to be a model in both Alberta and for many other municipalities in Canada. This meant adoption of new technologies and resulting improvements in a whole range of services and their levels of efficiency.
•    Realistic approach: The City wanted to focus on a practical and realistic business model that would be free of existing hype and exaggerated promises surrounding municipal networks. By relying on KAZAM’s expertise in wireless technologies, the City developed a clear and realistic understanding of its internal strengths and limits, and in the process, foresaw what type of challenges and opportunities lay ahead.
•    Readiness for change: The City wanted to think and act differently across multiple agencies and instill new energy and sense of motivation required for its desired transformations to come.

Vision and Goals

Faced with a rapidly growing economy in Alberta, and the resulting socio-economic transformations, the City’s management decided to develop a strategic vision with progress and economic prosperity as its main motivating themes. The elements of this vision can be described as follows:
•    Improve the delivery of municipal government services, such as emergency response, transit and automated vehicle monitoring systems, public safety, and wireless cameras;
•    Enhance public safety applications through increased access to data and video for public safety workers and support emergency preparedness and response services;
•    Stimulate economic development by attracting business leaders and entrepreneurs to locate or expand business operations in Grande Prairie without competing with telecom operators;
•    Increase options to its businesses, citizens, and visitors to access wireless internet.

Key Challenges and Risks

In the course of the feasibility study, a multitude of challenges emerged along organizational and technology lines. The first set of challenges involved aligning expectations of various stakeholders about the impact of a municipal wireless network on the City. The City, in conjunction with KAZAM’s senior management team, had to map out the challenges ahead and how they could be overcome. Stakeholders also needed to understand what the absence of a wireless network would entail for the City services and its economic plans.
Another set of challenges related to the deployment of the network, its operation and management, financial impact, regulatory issues such as acquisition of spectrum, as well as development of the right business model. For example, the costs associated with power consumption at light poles were so high that they could render the project unfeasible.

The Approach

A five-step approach was adopted to arrive at the best possible business model that not only would cater to the needs of various agencies in the City but also address stakeholders’ expectations. The first step involved understanding why the City considered having a municipal network and what socio-economic rationale existed for launching such a network.

During this step, management teams from the City and KAZAM spent considerable time reviewing requirements from a variety of agencies and stakeholders including municipal, public safety, health, education, businesses, and some citizen and visitors. The teams embarked on developing technical and financial projections and in the process evaluated relevant business models. Business models under study included building, owning, and managing the network right through to a complete hands-off model.

Due to Grande Prairie’s location and small population size, it was difficult to know the level of response that would be generated from a Request for Proposals (RFP). The City and consultants from KAZAM decided to issue a Request for Interest (RFI) to gauge the level of interest by wireless technology providers. The RFI outlined the City’s goals and objectives along with desired service characteristics. The RFI was designed as a precursor to the RFP.

The next step involved understanding required applications that would operate on the network. Knowing what applications are needed by what type of end users is important since they heavily influence the network design. Applications were grouped based on the platform they were going to be used from. Grouping of applications helps identify short, medium, and long-term goals of the City. The grouping was as follows:

•    Text based
•    Browser based
•    Buffered video
•    Multimedia

The third step entailed the development of network characteristics based on required applications. They included coverage, spectrum, backhaul, services, and design of downlink and uplink speeds. With a future-proof network in mind that would protect the City’s long-term investment, the KAZAM team looked at and analyzed all the critical factors in the network and matched them against the City’s objectives and decision criteria. These critical factors included:

•    Matching of network with required applications
•    Analyzing coverage requirements
•    Analyzing regulatory requirements for spectrum acquisition and applying for it through provincial and federal regulatory agencies
•    Developing service level agreements
•    Conducting cost estimates

On the regulatory side, the City faced the challenge of spectrum availability. Spectrum is the chief enabler of any wireless network and the right approach to acquiring it poses one of the most complex issues in wireless communications. Moreover, once the network architecture is designed, municipal governments need to secure access to mounting locations, such as light poles. For these purposes, management teams from the City and KAZAM mandated themselves with a process driven task as shown below:

Acquisition of 4.9 GHz Spectrum

- Analyzing spectrum needs across regulated and unregulated frequencies;
- Auditing of existing spectrum in Grande Prairie and negotiating for partial use;
- Preparing a business case to apply for 4.9 GHz Public Safety spectrum with Industry Canada and local regulatory agencies.

The above efforts culminated in the approval by Industry Canada and the subsequent acquisition of 4.9 GHz band for the City. The acquisition of the standard license to establish and operate the 4.9GHz Public Safety band is first of its kind by a municipality in Canada. Public safety applications that can use this frequency include fire pre-plans, emergency response data, on-line access to various databases, geographic information Systems (GIS) mapping, routing, location and infrastructure data, enforcement services information and applications, email and remote office functions, real time video feeds, and emergency operations centre communications and systems.

Once the application and network requirements were in place, the next set of efforts involved making a decision on the right business model. There were many different and sometimes competing priorities to consider. Some of these competing priorities included:

•    Economic development
•    Government efficiency
•    Universal wireless access
•    Digital inclusion
•    Market and demand creation through development of new services

An important goal of the above efforts was to arrive at a desired model that matched the goals of stakeholders with those of economic development outlined by Grande Prairie. Data was also used from Wireless Task Force Assessment Questionnaires and interviews with representative agencies within the City. Some of the key strategic questions that were asked are as follows:

•    Does the network address the city’s needs & goals?
•    What are the usage criteria for services?
•    How is the financing structured?
•    What regulatory requirements must be met?
•    Who will manage the network?

One of the main benefits of defining the business model prior to issuing an RFP was clarification and removal of internal barriers and inconsistencies among several stakeholder needs and goals. This practice created a receptive ground for the adoption of wireless technology. The following business models were reviewed and analyzed during the exercise:

As discussed, the City decided to issue an RFI prior to RFP to gauge the level of interest and the quality of responses from different interested parties. The City received a significant level of interest in the RFI, which served as a harbinger of things to come for the preparation of RFP.

Conclusion

The City of Grande Prairie arrived at its decision based on findings from the feasibility study and insights from a variety of stakeholders, which proved to the City that a wireless network would benefit the City and act as a driving force to meet the City’s goals and objectives. The City’s preferred business model is an anchor-tenant model. The RFI has produced very positive response from vendors. With the above information in hand, the following next steps have been considered:

•    Investigate if infrastructure grants are available
•    Conduct technology pilot for safety applications
•    Conduct application porting audit
•    Conduct an RF survey for WiFi spectrum in the City for interference assessment
•    Conduct a technology pilot for access in high interference zones to assess network behaviour

Based on the positive findings to date, and subject to the mitigation of potential outstanding issues, the City anticipates beginning the first stages of implementation of a full broadband community wireless system by the fall of 2008.

- - - - - - - - About the Author - - - - - - - - -

Brad Emond is the IT director of the City of Grande Prairie.