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fiber fast
High-speed fiber makes Eugene greener
I
magine internet so fast you could download nine
hours of audio in less than a second, or a two-hour
movie in less than 10. That fantasy is about to
become a reality in downtown Eugene.
The city has begun a project to connect up to
120 downtown buildings with fiber-optic internet
services, meaning businesses will soon have access
to much faster internet at much lower prices. The
glass cables used in fiber enable significantly
faster data transfer than their copper counterparts,
including download speeds of one gigabit — or 125
megabytes — per second for around $100 a month.
The city hopes that lightning-fast internet speed
will help accelerate high-tech business development by
encouraging recent college graduates and start-ups to do
business in Eugene.
And while the City Council’s decision to allocate $3
million of the Downtown Urban Renewal Plan budget
for fiber internet downtown drew scrutiny for diverting
tax revenue away from schools and county services,
the technology could have far-reaching impacts on
sustainability.
Studies show that connecting a city to fiber can
significantly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, which
have skyrocketed across the globe since the industrial
revolution, increasing heat in the atmosphere and causing
global climate change. If the city decides to expand
the downtown fiber project to the city’s residential
neighborhoods — a prospect some experts say is not
far down the road — fiber internet has the potential to
drastically shrink Eugene’s carbon footprint.
Fiber transmits data more efficiently than older
technologies and reduces the need for raw materials and
other resources, according to several studies, including a
2015 study by the Environmental News Network.
The laser-generated light signals sent over fiber carry
far more information than the electrical signals sent over
copper and coaxial cables, requiring dozens of times less
20
A pril 20, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
ILLUSTRATION FOR EUGENE WEEKLY BY LILY PADULA
BY KENNY JACOBY
Studies show that connecting a
city to fiber can significantly
reduce its greenhouse gas emissions,
which have skyrocketed across
the globe since the industrial
revolution, increasing heat in the
atmosphere and causing global
climate change.
energy to operate and degrading far slower, leading to a
much longer lifespan. Fiber also better accommodates
increasing customer demand, able to withstand increased
workloads without installing additional cables.
Local experts say introducing fiber to downtown Eugene
will have far-reaching effects directly in the community.
Matt Sayre, a director at the Technology Association of
Oregon (TAO), says Eugene has already seen and will
continue to see more telecommuting, meaning people are
able to work remotely instead of driving to the office and
thereby releasing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
“You can live in a great place like Eugene, and you can
work for a company like Microsoft in Seattle, and many
people do,” Sayre says.
Sayre also foresees a spike in the practice of
telemedicine — the remote diagnosis and treatment of
patients — and major improvements in the ability to track
environmental indicators, such as monitoring air or water
pollution.
EWEB Commissioner John Simpson says fiber
downtown will attract many green businesses to the
area, such as engineering design firms, data aggregators
and software development firms that have the need for
high bandwidth. Videoconferencing, he says, will be
“seamless,” so the need to commute by plane or car will
drastically decrease.
“We’re not talking Skype, which freezes up six times a
meeting, and you have to say, ‘Would you say that again?’”
Simpson says. “It’s not going to be like that. It’s going to
be 100 percent seamless.”
Anne Fifield, an economic development planner at
the city of Eugene, says that because the downtown fiber
project will also connect residential buildings, it will limit
sprawling development by creating opportunities to live
and work within walking distance of each other, reducing
greenhouse gas emissions.
“This is infrastructure that will enhance downtown’s
attractiveness,” she says. “More things will be built, and
more people will want to live downtown, and those people
will have very low greenhouse gas emissions.”
Although the city does not have the infrastructure
underground or money to expand the fiber network
beyond downtown, it does already have hundreds of miles
of fiber cable running alongside above-ground electrical
wires that connect schools and public buildings.
Sayre says some internet service providers are already
examining ways to use that infrastructure as a jumping-
off point to connect Eugene’s residential neighborhoods.
“I think in the next year we’ll see examples of $59
gigabit connections in both Eugene and Springfield in
residential situations” he says. ■