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TALKING BROADBAND AND FIBER OPTICS

IN THE WORLD AND MAYBE ALSO VICTORIA

Henry Pryor is the City of Victoria’s representative on the Lake Minnetonka Communications Commission. For his work on this commission as well as on the LMCC’s executive board, Mayor Mary Thun presented Mr. Pryor a certificate of appreciation at the June 12th city council meeting.

Said Mr. Pryor, “Some people ask me why I do what I do. In Spring Park we get a little bottle of pop and a cookie and a little pizza at the end of a very long meeting. I’m a friend of Gary Delaney who said to me, ‘I’m going to get you on this board!’” Gary Delaney, also a resident of Victoria, represented Victoria in the past and also as Carver County Commissioner.

Continued Mr. Pryor, “Just because we’re in the lakes area doesn’t mean everybody can afford broadband. A lot of advances are coming up in broadband.”

A google search defines broadband networks as infrastructures in a community, or across the nation, that carry information from one place to another. The wider the bandwidth, the greater the information carrying capacity. Broadband is often called high speed internet because it usually has a high rate of transmission. The United States is in the middle of an expensive transition away from copper based networks, however, to fiber optics.

Said Sally Koenecke, administrator at LMCC, “Maybe wireless isn’t meeting the needs out here. There are a lot of trees. We’re learning that broadband is probably going to be the wave of the future. Over the years, this has evolved from being a cable commission to a communications commission ...

“The FAA has ruled that the internet is not a cable service but an information service, but we take all the calls anyway. A lot of the conferences we attend cover all of this. Broadband is a fiber that goes in the ground or through poles.”

Various google searches are more explicit in their definitions of fiber optics. The simplest one states that fiber optic lines are strands of optically pure glass, as thin as human hair, that carry digital information over long distances. Another one: fiber optics is the transmission of data in the form of pulses of light ... It uses very thin strands of glass to conduct information coded in pulses of light.

Continued Sally Koenecke, “The LMCC is acting as a study group and bringing information to city councils. Maybe cities will want to do this themselves. Is it up to us [the LMCC] to do this or should the citizens be driving this? We’re trying to educate the cities.”

She introduced Eric Lampland, president of Lookout Point Communications, who has worked in this field for 30 years. Said Mr. Lampland, “These questions are in front of us all today. The future is taking the same services and using fiber optics. This is just a change of technology, and it has financial implications. Cable companies are not sufficient to carry all of this. This is becoming a large issue in the United States.”

He continued, “It’s also a question of whether or not we’re competitive in the world ... In some cases, service providers step forward to pull you forward. My company is working with 50 cities now in the Twin Cities area.”

He added, “The LMCC is a valuable conduit for you. Lakeville and Eagan did their studies and saw it was a benefit to do this with others.”

Councilmember Richard Tieden mentioned the Association of Carver County Elected Representatives and their meetings which he has been attending. “That group met last week again and we’re working collectively,” he said, “The number one thing they voted on was fiber optics. We’re working together as a county.”

Stated Mr. Pryor, “Things will be a lot more cost efficient if we do things collectively.”

To enhance a layman’s (or an editor’s) understanding of broadband and fiber optics, google tells us that the wider the bandwidth, the greater the information carrying capacity. A very narrow band will carry Morse Code. A broader band will carry speech. A still broader band will carry music. Television antenna that is broadband can receive more channels.

Bandwidth denotes the width of frequency band used to transmit data. The broader the width, the faster the connection. Digital bandwidth is usually measured in bytes per second, a byte being one unit of information.

A four-lane highway can carry more traffic than a two-lane highway.

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