WiFi – WiFi Service continues to grow at a steady pace. We are continuing to make enhancements to the network as necessary to stay on top of performance issues. The demand that is being placed on this network is remarkable.

Rural Wireless – We are continuing to see decent growth in the rural area. This is a sector that requires much more “effort” to gain customers primarily because people are not aware that they can get service. We are launching some strategic efforts to bring more customers online in these areas.

Fiber to the Home – A lot of progress is occurring in the FTTH project. We have been very busy exploring several options and will hopefully be coming to council with a recommendation on proceeding in early September. The good news is this project looks to have a very viable future, connecting all the homes and business in Sandy is achievable within the next 9 to 12 months.

Business Fiber – We are currently exploring 3 additional opportunities to bring business customers online. It looks very promising that we will be able to provide a price point for our service that is attractive to these businesses and gives them a much better service than would be available by any other means.

IT Department

Remote Access – We have rolled out the new remote access system that was previously in testing and it is working very well. We are in the process of implementing some additional upgrades to the IT infrastructure specifically in the virtual environment that looks promising for performance and feature enhancements.

WiFi – We had 36 new installations for the month of May. Growth on the network is staying pretty steady. Overall the network is performing well, we are dealing with problem areas as quickly as possible when they are identified.

This was also the first month of realizing the rate increase in the WiFi service billing as can be seen by the revenue graph below. So far very few customers have called to complain about the increase, and most of those have been very understanding when we explain the reasoning.

Rural Wireless – Growth in the rural area is continuing to stay fairly steady. We are continuing to do targeted marketing in areas that have line of sight to our towers and are seeing good success with those efforts.

Fiber to the Home – Progress continues on the FTTH front. There have been some new developments on the i3 front that are very promising. In the meantime we worked closely with another company this month to provide an alternative option for a city wide fiber network. We expect to see the results of that work in late June.

Another new neighborhood is in the planning stages for FTTH. Pioneer Meadows on University and Meeker will be the second neighborhood to fall under the new conduit code provisions.

Business Fiber – There is a lot of talk and buzz in the business fiber space but nothing has materialized this month. Hopefully we will see some new customers in this area soon.

IT Department

Camera System – We have spent quite a lot of time this month working on the security camera system. There have been some significant enhancements made to the software that manges the various cameras around the city facilities. An update has been performed to implement those enhancements. We also added several new cameras to the system this month including the Library cameras and some new cameras in the Plaza.

Remote Access – We have implemented a new remote access system that is highly secure (not to mention complex). It is only in testing phases at the moment, but once completed this system will give us the ability to give staff outstanding access to the city resources they need while out in the field.

Core Infrastructure – There was a bit of scare this month with the Clackamas County Fiber. A tree trimmer was apparently a bit careless with his chainsaw and hit the fiber near Orient drive. Fortunately for us the portion of the cable that we are utilizing was not damaged, but Clackamas County did have to send out crews to repair the cable which caused an outage for SandyNet.

This was a perfect example of the importance of redundancy. As the Clackamas county link was taken down for repair, all of our traffic immediately shifted to our secondary connection into Portland which effectively meant no noticeable outage for our customers.

WiFi – We have installed a new test access point that looks promising as an option to continue to grow the WiFi network with high performance at a low cost. Customer growth on the WiFi network is continuing at a steady pace.

Rural Wireless – Growth in the rural area is continuing to stay fairly steady. We are continuing to do targeted marketing in areas that have line of sight to our towers.

Fiber to the Home – We have several companies involved in helping us look at options for the FTTH project. Probably the most interesting of these is a fiber cable manufacturer that is actively working on a design and implementation plan for the entire city. This will allow us to very accurately project the costs of a deployment which will help greatly in securing financing should we pursue an alternative to the i3 agreement.

Business Fiber – We have had interest for several new business customers to connect to SandyNet fiber. Construction on the current extension projects is nearly completed and we anticipate having those new sites online by the end of May or early June.

WiFi – Growth on the WiFi network continues at a steady pace. We are continuing to make optimizations and improvements to the network infrastructure as necessary to maintain acceptable levels of performance. A letter will be going out in this Month’s water bill news letter to let the subscribers know about the $5 rate increase coming up in April.

Rural Wireless – We are still seeing a fairly good response to our marketing efforts in the rural area.

Fiber to the Home – No new updates from i3. We are exploring alternatives for a FTTH solution for existing neighborhoods in case that agreement falls through.

We met with a consulting firm this week to begin the process of creating design standards for the FTTH in newly developed neighborhoods. We are also working with that same consultant on a deployment design for the Snowberry development.

Business Fiber – Construction continues on our new business fiber extensions. We are anticipating having service up in a few more months.

IT Department

WiFi – Growth on the WiFi network continues at a steady pace.

Rural Wireless – Focused marketing efforts in the rural area seem to be making an impact. We had nine new customers in the rural area last month and are working to maintain that pace for February.

Fiber to the Home – i3 appears to be still running behind schedule. In our most recent contact with them they assured us they are still moving forward with the project but are working out a few internal issues.

Business Fiber – Construction has begun on our new business fiber extensions.

IT Department

WiFi – Growth on the WiFi network continues at a steady pace. The new utilization methods that I mentioned in the November report continue to show promise.

Rural Wireless – Rural growth continues to be a challenge but we are focusing efforts with some guerrilla marketing that seems to be making an impact in getting more customer sign ups.

Fiber to the Home – As of our last discussion with i3 they are a few weeks behind schedule but still anticipate having ground crews showing up in January to begin surveying to finalize designs.

Business Fiber – Progress continues on the new business fiber extensions. We received multiple quotes and have given a contractor the green light to proceed with design and construction of three lateral connections from business locations to the CBX infrastructure.

IT Department

WiFi – We are in the middle of testing some new methods of utilizing our existing WiFi network inside city limits to gain some additional performance out of the system without a major investment into upgrades. So far the results are promising and we feel that we can likely keep performance up while we await the deployment of the fiber network.

Rural Wireless – We are continuing to work with property owners in a few locations to install additional wireless infrastructure in the rural area. We are also continuing to install customers that can access our existing tower infrastructure.

Fiber to the Home – At this point i3 is still on schedule to begin construction of the FTTP network this spring. They anticipate having survey crews in Sandy starting in January to begin finalizing the design process. We are continuing to explore options for video service once the new network is built. Staff will be proposing some options to the SandyNet Advisory Board this week to get some further direction on which route to pursue.

Business Fiber – We are working with several business customers up the mountain that are interested in getting access to fiber service. This is made possible due to the County’s new fiber network that they have constructed. As a partner in their project we have the ability to utilize their network to deliver service to these businesses.

IT Department

WiFi – Installations on the WiFi network have continued at the average pace. We are continuing to implement network upgrades in an effort to stay on top of increasing demands.

Rural Wireless – We have identified a few areas of high interest in the rural area and are working with property owners to install equipment to provide localized SandyNet repeaters like we have done in other areas.

Fiber to the Home – There has been a lot of development on this project. We are working with i3 to move forward on construction design and preperation.

Conferences – Councilor Pietzold and I attended two conferences regarding Fiber to the Home in September. We received some very good information and made a lot of great contacts that will be greatly beneficial to our FTTP project.

WiFi – We continue to see growth on the WiFi service. The graph below shows the number of new customer installations performed from August 2011 to August 2012. The grand total for that one year period was 427.

Rural Wireless – Growth in the rural wireless area is continuing. There were no major system developments this month but several new customers were added. We are in the process of taking corrective measures for our 900 Mhz system in an effort to boost performance of that system as well as allow for the addition of more customers.

Fiber to the Home – Progress continues on the FTTH project. In August we finalized the contract negotiations and council approved the contract to be signed in early September.

WiFi – We continue to see growth on the WiFi service. Infrastructure upgrades have been made to four neighborhoods so far this summer and we have several more neighborhoods scheduled for improvements.

Rural Wireless – We added another business customer in the rural area this month with the Oral Hull Foundation. We were able to provide a very cost effective WiFi build for their entire campus bringing high speed internet service to their office, lodge, dorms and mobile home park area. I talked with the manager last week who informed me that their guests have been very happy with the service. Projects like this make the red tape on the USDA project worth it for me.