PacketFront's solution enhances the quality of life in British Columbia, Canada

Columbia Mountain Open Network (CMON) is a Canadian not-for-profit corporation, established to build and manage an open access, broadband network covering the 90,000 km² Columbia Basin region of British Columbia.

The goal of CMON is to deliver a first-class telecommunications infrastructure at fair prices to every resident, educational institution, health facility, business and community group in the Columbia Basin region of British Columbia. The CMON will enhance the quality of life in the Columbia Basin by: fostering communication between families; improving access to services; increasing educational opportunities for students and teachers; enhancing healthcare services; and increasing opportunities for business and economic development.

The CMON initiative is the first of its kind in Canada, and is predicated on improving the quality of life in this predominantly rural area. CMON's ultimate objective is to provide a region-wide broadband network with reliable, high-bandwidth, last mile connectivity, covering up to 75,000 households and businesses in over 75 rural communities.

"The Columbia Basin region of British Columbia is a vast, mountainous area, and many of the 175,000 people who live here do so in small, geographically dispersed rural settlements," said Jeff Roberts, CEO at CMON. "Maintaining communities and providing a sense of connectedness is central to the CMON initiative. Through the deployment of an advanced broadband communications network, our aim is to deliver high quality business and social services to people living in remote and often inaccessible parts of the region. We can only do this by partnering with companies such as PacketFront, who provide not only technological expertise, but also support our vision of a locally sustainable, open access network model."

In conducting its tendering process, CMON insisted that the solution support open access, whereby multiple service providers and organisations would be able to compete to deliver broadband services over the same physical infrastructure. "In Canada, the old paradigm of monopoly-based delivery of services has essentially survived deregulation intact," continued Roberts. "This means that our rural residents and businesses still do not enjoy the benefits of competition: lower prices, diversity of service offerings, and higher quality services. One of the primary goals of our initiative has been to bring choice to everyone in our region. PacketFront was the company best positioned to meet this strict requirement."

The creation of the CMON network will address in particular three major regional issues:

• Economic diversification - by dramatically improving the telecommunications infrastructure, CMON aims to not only retain and grow the existing employee base in the region through the support of local businesses, but also attract inward investment from companies keen to relocate from urban environments.
• Educational opportunities - the CMON network will link local schools, colleges and home learners to the each other and world, enabling the creation of new practices and the delivery of world class services both into our region, and from our region to the world. CMON's goal is to help create the environment that will make our region more competitive to keeping and attracting residents and businesses and enabling a world-class education system is a significant part of that strategy.
• Improved healthcare - the CMON network will enable the provision of remote medical diagnoses and general healthcare advice.

"CMON is an ambitious project that we believe demonstrates a holistic and sustainable approach to the development of rural, community-based broadband," continued Roberts. "Open access networks, while mature in the energy markets, represent a relatively new paradigm in telecommunications, so it was vital for us to find partners with significant experience in developing, deploying and managing these networks. So in terms of vendors, it was extremely important for us to get a complete solution - not simply a boxful of equipment, but also a roomful of real world expertise to help us deploy it successfully as well. Additionally, partnering with PacketFront gives us complete flexibility while using one common architecture."

The construction of the CMON fibre network itself is slated to begin during the last part of 2003. PacketFront, CMON and their Operations Partner Axia Netmedia Corp. recently established the operational control site and have begun preliminary testing. The roll-out of the entire network is due to be complete within 3-5 years.

"One key requirement we had was that each of our local communities needed the flexibility to select the best-suited last-mile infrastructure for them selves without compromising the integrity of the complete network. Again, PacketFront's solution rose to the top as it supported and committed to continuing to offer a controlled service and operational environment independent of last-mile technologies," added Roberts. Packetfront's Intelligent Broadband Solution currently supports Ethernet, fibre to the home (FTTH), wireless, VDSL and ADSL/ADSL2+ connections.

The key component of PacketFront's Intelligent Broadband Solution is BECS, the award-winning service control and provisioning system. BECS enables companies such as CMON to build and manage fully automated True Broadband Networks with on-demand, self- provisioning functionality. This gives end users the ability to increase capacity and change services them selves, cutting out the delay of waiting for a third party to make the changes. This feature also significantly reduces network owners' operational costs.

"CMON came to us purely on the strength of our Intelligent Broadband Solution's reputation within the telecoms industry - it's a great way to win business!" said Martin Thunman, CEO of PacketFront. "CMON is exactly the type of innovative, forward-looking company that we want to partner with, and this project is an excellent illustration of how next generation telecommunications can genuinely enhance the quality of people's lives."

Qotes from Matt Wenger, President CMON/Canada:

"CMON is building a regional Open Access network in British Columbia, Canada, with the objective to cover up to 75 .000 households and businesses in over 75 rural communities. Being a not-for-profit organisation with limited staff, it was extremely important for us to get a complete solution - not simply a boxful of equipment, but a roomful of real-world expertise to help us deploy it successfully as well.

The way in which PacketFront enables open access is very important to us as it allows us to drive competition into our small rural markets, utilize a wide variety of last-mile technologies, and develop innovative business models to ensure the sustainability of our initiative.

Our "last-mile" networks will include fibre, VDSL, ADSL/ADSL2+, and possibly wireless depending on density, cost and speed of deployment. Partnering with PacketFront gives us the possibility to have complete flexibility while using one common architecture."