Permits take ‘fiber ring’ on starting line

District 205 officials hope about $2 million spent for a wide area network Internet system can be leveraged into a metropolitan area network that could include Galesburg, Carl Sandburg College, Knox College and other educational and governmental agencies. The MAN could be used for a public safety/emergency services network, as well as a city-wide Wi-Fi network.

District 205 Superintendent Gene Denisar said Wednesday the firm doing the work expects to complete it this fall.

“Completion is right about the time school starts in the fall,” Denisar said he was told. “I think that will be great. I think we’ll be lucky if that happens. I’m thinking more like October.”

The fiber optic ring will connect all buildings in District 205, as well as Knox and Carl Sandburg colleges.

The uses of such a network are basically limited only by the imagination of the entities that will be part of it. In addition to public safety and the Wi-Fi network, there can be Internet bandwidth sharing. The network can be used as an economic development tool; a marketing tool, promoting the community as “wired”; and a public service tool for increasing bandwidth, improving accessibility and providing another “quality of life” tool.

Some of the fiber optic will be carried by poles. Assistant Superintendent for Operations and Finance Guy Cahill said the aerial work will start “in a couple of weeks.”

Cahill explained, “At some locations, like the railroad tracks, it will run on the poles, then it will run under the tracks and back up the poles. In some cases, even state highways require it” (running the cable underneath).

Standing outside Lombard Middle School’s geo-thermal field as he talked during a tour of construction work under way there, Cahill said at Lombard, “they’ll run (cable) underground into the building.”

He said the cable has been sitting in a warehouse for a while as the permitting process edged forward.

“Because we have this network connecting everything, we have the opportunity to leverage this connectivity to bring about what we were unable to achieve through competition,” he said earlier.

The inspiration for the project came about last year when Galesburg entered Google’s competition that would have resulted in a similar network. Galesburg was not chosen by Google, but District 205, as part of its Operation Rebuild-Achievement project, is upgrading its Internet.

While work for Operation Rebuild-Achievement remains on schedule, Cahill laughed and said Wednesday, “the fiber’s going to get a little bit closer (to being done later than scheduled) than we wanted it to.”