news story / By Hank Sims

Fiber, Fiber Everywhere

Look closely — redundant broadband is all around us

(June 25, 2009)  For years, one of the chief goals of local government and business has been to bring a second fiber optic line into Humboldt County. The hope is that it a redundant line will provide backup service in the event that our main line, which runs along Highway 101, goes down.

On a few occassions in recent years, particularly bad fiber optic outages have crippled not only Internet access but phone communications, as well as key activities like banking and ATM services that now depend entirely on a digital communication link with the outside world.

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Currently, there are two public initiatives to bring redundant fiber into the county. Both propose to run a new line east to the Interstate 5 corridor — either along Hwy 299 or Hwy 36 — bringing broadband access to rural communities along the way. Neither group has publicly announced any progress in recent months.

But what neither group seems to have considered is that it is that technologically speaking, at least, it’s not necessary to run a new line all the way to the Central Valley. In recent days, many North Coast technology-watchers have been shocked to discover that there’s already a live fiber optic line running through Trinity County, and that line predates our own connection to the fiber optic grid by as much as a decade.

Trinity County Chief Administrative Officer Dero Forslund confirmed to the Journal Tuesday that a fiber optic line depicted on a 2003 map put out by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC), a state nonprofit advocacy group, is in fact live and operational. The map shows a fiber line running northeast out of Cloverdale, up through Lake and Trinity Counties and into Oregon.

Theoretically, a redundant line to Humboldt could tap into this existing trunk. The barrier to access appears to be more a financial than a logistical, though: The owner of the line won’t let the locals touch it.

“AT&T has fiber running north and south through the county,” Forslund said Tuesday. “As we speak, no one has access to that.”

Forslund said that a local Internet service provider has confirmed with AT&T that the line has spare capacity, but said that the company has made it clear that it is not currently interested in opening that capacity up for the use of locals along the line.

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