How marina residents got blazing-fast Internet.
There are 37 slips on the F dock at the Port Credit Harbour Marina, and for a long time these residents used Wi-Fi to gain access to the online world. Since April 2014, some of them have found a better solution through the good people at Fidalia Networks: fibre-optics.
“The trouble with Wi-Fi,” says Shaun Rossi, manager at Fidalia, “is that it’s difficult to get proper blanket coverage. It’s only as strong as its weakest link and there can be interference and distance issues. Much of the old Bell Canada copper infrastructure at the marina has decayed, and there’s no co-axial infrastructure so Rogers isn’t an option, either. We came up with something better.”
Fibre-optics is the best technology available today when it comes to high-speed connectivity. It’s immune to interference, it’s generally not sensitive to distance, and it’s seldom affected by weather. The trade-off is that it’s a wired medium; you still have to plug it in. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing—many among the technologically adept, including Rossi, will tell you that wired is the way to go.
“Basically, if you want the fastest Internet in Mississauga, live on a boat,” he says.
How it Works
Inside the boat is an optical network connection—think of it as a fibre router—with an Ethernet switch and Wi-Fi. A fibre cable runs from the boat to the dock (don’t worry, it’s not dangerous; fibre optics works by transmitting light, not electricity), and plugs into a pedestal at the dock which then goes back to the network aggregation equipment in the building. “Everyone gets their own IP address,” says Rossi. “We’ve set it up so that there’s one fibre connection per subscriber, sort of like a newer string of Christmas lights—if one goes down for whatever reason, it won’t drag along the rest. That also makes it easier for us to troubleshoot problems.”
How Fast Is Fast?
This new set-up at F dock can clock speeds of up to 1 GB/second. Let me put that into perspective for you. If you test your Internet connection speed at home and get, say, 20 MB/second, that’s solid. You could download the average half-hour TV sitcom in under a minute, if your speed is consistent.
This is 50 times faster.
“That’s well over anything the average user would ever currently need in day-to-day use,” says Rossi, “but running optical would give you, for example, perfect Netflix sessions or trouble-free telecommuting or videoconferencing. Distance and latencies can, however, affect speed, so you might not get 1 GB/second all the time, but you’ll still be much faster than most anyone else.”
So… can I switch my house over to fibre, then? “If you wanted to pay $100,000 for it, you could,” says Rossi. “That’s the quote I recently got from Bell. I’d have to place 2.4 kilometres of cable to bring it to my house. Replacing an old copper network with optical would involve construction, municipal consent, a great deal of organization, and customers. You’d have to lay down an entirely new infrastructure. It’s not a trivial feat.”
Fidalia is part of the commercial community at the marina, and has been in business since 2000. They started off by setting up small workgroup solutions and servers for offices and the like, and in 2007 Internet services became a major part of their business. They also offer wide-area networking, cloud services, disaster recovery, IT network management, tech support and telephony.
That said, Fidalia focuses on broadband and network solutions for business. They don’t really do residential, largely because at the moment third-party ISPs like Fidalia can’t access residential-grade optical from private networks like Bell and Rogers. Where they excel is in providing enterprise-class optical networking for medium to large sized businesses, which is available to them through Bell and Rogers.
“It’s a dream of ours to be involved in some sort of neighbourhood-deployed fibre project,” says Rossi. “We’ve got the experience and we deliver Internet services across Canada to lots of different enterprises and business. We know our stuff.”
The F dock project was conceived by Wayne Petryk, controller of Centre City Capital Limited (operator of the Port Credit Harbour Marina for over 36 years). “Centre City has been at the forefront of innovation in the marina business,” says Petryk, “and we wanted to enhance the boating experience for our residents by delivering fibre-optics right to their boats. It was a complex undertaking, but the expertise of Fidalia made it a reality.”
(Originally posted on mississaugalife.ca. The print version originally appeared in Spirit of the City/Mississauga Life, issue 29, 2015; the PDF of that is available here.)
Leo Graziani 