Monthly Report – May 2012

Posted on June 13, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – Enhancements to the WiFi network continue. We have added several new infrastructure improvements over the past month and have upgrades planned for five neighborhoods that will keep us busy for the next month or two. Customer growth is staying steady on the WiFi system.

The tower training and new climbing equipment continues to be put to good use as we add this new infrastructure. Below are some photos of our first climb that we used our new rappelling systems on, this enables us to work much faster for certain tasks on the tower while still maintaining excellent safety.

Rural Wireless – Customer growth is continuing in the rural area, we are still working on ways to increase this growth. We are in the process of making a few administrative changes that will improve scheduling and add some additional marketing opportunities to expand in this area.

Fiber to the Home – We received some updated numbers from contractors but the cost is still just out of reach for hitting the $39.95 target for service. We are in the preliminary phases of discussion with another company that has some very progressive deployment technologies that they say would allow us to realize a significant cost savings. We will probably have an update on this front soon.

Business Fiber – We are in the process of adding a new business fiber customer. Councilor Coleman’s building on Proctor Blvd. should have service within the next few weeks.

IT Department

Virtualization Project – In the past month a lot of optimizations have been made to the virtualization system. We have successfully deployed the technology in one of our officers patrol cars as a test case and it appears to be working well. One of the major benefits of this is we can provide tech support for the officers while they are in the car without them having to drive over to our office, or meet them at the patrol station. The virtual desktop environment allows us to provide remote support wherever and whenever they need it.

Monthly Report – April 2012

Posted on May 17, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – We are continuing to add infrastructure to the WiFi network to keep up with demands. It seems to be a constant battle as the usage of customers is increasing consistently.

Rural Wireless – We mounted our first WiFi system in a tree up on Moonbeam drive. So far we have three customers taking advantage of that system but we hope to add five to ten more in that area. We also installed a dedicated point to point link to a business customer in the Boring area that had need of a high bandwidth solution to replace some T1’s. This is a great benefit to both SandyNet and the customer as it is an excellent revenue stream for us, and a huge performance increase AND cost savings for the customer.

Fiber to the Home – Still awaiting information from our contractor on potential cost reductions for this project.

IT Department

Virtualization Project – Progress continues on moving more users over to the new virtual desktop system. We have had a few problems to overcome, but overall performance is an improvement over what most users were used to with their old physical desktops.

Monthly Report – March 2012

Posted on April 13, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – Upgrades to existing WiFi neighborhoods continue as demand for the service is staying high. This month we have added additional infrastructure to several neighborhoods in order to keep performance from declining during peak hours. We are rolling out some new equipment for testing that will hopefully enable us to finally start offering the new, faster “SandyNet +” service (the new rate that was set by council earlier this FY).

Rural Wireless – We have deployed another localized WiFi coverage area at a mobile home park on 352nd. This is an approach we really like to use as it makes service more reliable and installs much easier. We are continuing to look for additional areas to replicate this model.

Fiber to the Home – Still awaiting information from our contractor on potential cost reductions for this project.

Tower Climbing – Scott Brown and I went through tower climber training last month. It was a refresher for me and new material for him. We are now both certified as “competent climbers” and have basic tower rescue training which makes tower work much safer and more effecient. Below is a photo of Scott’s first climb up on the new Waybill tower.

Customer Billings –

IT Department

Virtualization Project – We are continuing to slowly roll out virtual desktops. Four of the five city facilities now have at least one user on the system.

Monthly Report – February 2012

Posted on March 15, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – I keep expecting to see the demands for the WiFi service slow down but it continues to stay up at around 40 installs per month. We are implementing upgrades to neighborhoods as fast as we can to keep up with the demands all this customer growth is placing on the network. The graph below shows the number of installs we have done over the past months. This data is current as of 3/14, we expect to hit around 40 again this month.

Rural Wireless – We have printed some marketing materials and begun a targeted approach to service areas that we know we can provide quality service in. There have been some software updates that we are testing that may get us closer to being able to start adding customers to our non-line of sight service again.

Fiber to the Home – We are continuing to look into ways to lower project costs and move forward with a pilot deployment for FTTH. We met with Fibersphere early this month to discuss available options for redesigning the deployment to reduce overhead.

Customer Billings –

IT Department

PD RMS – We have been working with the police department to get their new records management system up and operational. They have training scheduled this week to start using the new software.

Library Move – We moved the IT infrastructure for the Library back to the “new” old building for the grand opening. Things went very smoothly once again showing the benefit and flexibility of the infrastructure we have put into place like fiber and the voice over IP systems.

We installed a new type of WiFi at the Library to make sure that patrons have good wireless signal available anywhere in the building. As of 10:00 AM on 3/14 (one week after opening) we have had 323 individual devices associated to the wireless network.

We also installed 9 security cameras at various locations around the building with a new type of camera we have been waiting nearly 12 months to launch. We are still working out a few glitches with this system but overall the video quality is very good and the cost of these new cameras is less than 1/5th of comparable cameras on the market.

Staff Report 02/19/12

Posted on February 17, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – Demand for the WiFi service continues to grow at impressive rates. Installations are going well. Below is a graph showing installs per month as of 02/16/12. February will continue to grow as we progress through the month.

Rural Wireless – We are continuing to work on strategies to increase subscriptions in the rural area. We have identified several high density areas that we have had high levels of interest in. We are working on strategies to deploy localized networks to these areas to make installations easier and improve the quality of the service.

Fiber to the Home – We have received an impressive amount of responses to our FTTH survey in Cascadia and Bornstedt neighborhoods. We did not receive responses from a majority of the residents but we came very close. After discussing our results with the SandyNet Advisory Board they suggested that we look at ways to reduce project costs and determine if we can install a more modest network design. This would allow us to only charge people who are interested in service without requirig a base fee from the non subscribing property owners.

Customer Billings –

IT Department

Virtualization Project – Progress continues on the virtualization project. We now have about a ten users primarily at City Hall that have been migrated to virtual desktops. So far the transitions have been smooth though they are a little more time consuming than I anticipated.

Generator Failure – The last 3 power outages we have experienced in Sandy (over the past year or so) have all resulted in failures of some sort with our generator at City Hall. This is a very big problem for our server and switch equipment as it is not good for the majority of those devices to be abruptly powered off. We do have battery systems in place that can sustain systems for 15 to 20 minutes, but the batteries were only designed to give the generator time to start up.

I have been in contact with an electrician to get some recommendations on fixing this problem. The solution appears to be replacing our current 25 KW generator with a 50 KW generator, or adding an additional 25 KW generator to supplement the current one. I am working on an RFP and solicit proposals for both of these options to determine which is most cost effective.

HVAC Failure – A few weeks ago I had an HVAC company come out to do some “routine” maintenance on our air conditioner for the server room. Unfortunately after they performed some cleaning one of the parts on the AC unit failed and overheated several devices in our data room. Luckily nothing was damaged and we got things repaired. We will be adding a secondary air conditioner to help control the heat in the room and also provide redundancy in the event that we experience another failure.

Staff Report – 01/17/12

Posted on January 9, 2012 by jknapp

SandyNet

WiFi – WiFi installs continue to exceed expectations. The popularity of this service is really amazing. Below is a graph that shows the number of installs we have done per month since we started doing them in August through January as of 01/13/12.

Rural Wireless – We have hit a few speed bumps with the rural project that have slowed down installations. The 900 Mhz system that works best for penetrating trees appears to still have some software glitches that need to be worked out by the product manufacturer. For the time being I have made a decision to stop installing customers on this system because I am not satisfied with the performance we can deliver. We are focusing our efforts in the rural area on customers that have line of sight to the towers and can use our other frequencies which are performing very well.

Fiber to the Home – We are moving forward with outreach efforts for the FTTH Pilot Project. Signs have been placed in Cascadia Village and we have started a door to door effort. Sign ups continue to come in, we will have a SandyNet Advisory Board meeting toward the end of January to discuss the results in detail.

Customer Billings –

New office Space – We have partially moved to our new location. There is still a lot of inventory to be moved and a lot of cleaning to do.

IT Department

Virtualization Project – We have deployed virtual desktop infrastructure to a few test users (Scott Lazenby being the first). So far things are working very well. We are ironing out a few kinks but performance is certainly meeting expectations so far.

We also now have a remote access solution in place that will allow our police officers to access the virtual desktop infrastructure from within their patrol cars. This will give them the benefit of having all of the internal network resources from anywhere that their cellular internet connections work (accessing files on the internal servers, printing back at the office, accessing the new records management infrastructure, etc.)

Staff Report – 12/19/11

Posted on December 12, 2011 by jknapp

STAFF REPORT TO SANDY CITY COUNCIL

MEETING DATE: 12/19/11
BY: Joe Knapp
SUBJECT: IT Department – Monthly Report

SandyNet

WiFi – Our new contract position for a WiFi Installer is up and running. Ryan Spitzengel was the candidate we chose. He has been doing in city WiFi installs on his own for the past two weeks. It has been wonderful to have that burden removed from our normal staff.

Now that we have some resources freed up we are working on continuing to upgrade the WiFi infrastructure in the City to keep our speeds up and customers happy.

Rural Wireless – The Waybill tower has the majority of its new antennas mounted on it. There is still a fair amount of work to be done, but it is to a point where we can start adding customers to it now and take advantage of the increased coverage area.

Fiber to the Home – Responses to the FTTH project have been less than we anticipated. We are coordinating an effort to do some door to door reach out for the neighborhood for a few final pushes to see if the interest level is high enough to proceed with the project in this neighborhood.

Customer Billings – Customer sign ups for the in city WiFi continue to exceed expectations.

New office Space – We have signed a lease for some new office space for the SandyNet/IT Staff. We were able to secure 2100 square feet of space for $500 a month.

The location is above the trophy shop in Sandy, next door to Stephanies Cafe and councilor Coleman’s building. It isn’t quite as convenient as having a space next door to city hall, but the space was in much better condition and gives us four times the room for the same price. We are in the process of getting the space ready to move into.

IT Department

Virtualization Project – Work continues on rolling out the new virtualization infrastructure. We still have a few software components that are causing some hangups. Unfortunately due to scheduling conflicts we have not been able to upgrade them as quickly as I would have liked, but I hope to have some additional forward progress made on actually deploying desktops by the end of January.

Staff Report – 11/21/11

Posted on November 16, 2011 by jknapp

STAFF REPORT TO SANDY CITY COUNCIL

MEETING DATE: 11/21/11
BY: Joe Knapp
SUBJECT: IT Department – Monthly Report

SandyNet

WiFi – The installations that we have been performing are proving to be very successful. Low rate of customer support calls and lower cancellations have been recorded since we began this service. I am scheduling interviews this week to bring a contract employee on to help us facilitate the installations without consuming so much staff time.

Rural Wireless – Construction on the Waybill tower has been completed (as you may have read in the Sandy Post). We are working on getting equipment installed so we can begin moving customers over.

We were able to get Oregon’s Wild Harvest connected down on Phelps Rd. This had become one of the major goals of this new tower as it allowed us to provide service between Oregon’s Wild Harvest farm location on Phelps Rd with wireless service and at their new location in Sandy with our fiber service. Since both of their locations are on SandyNet we are able to get very creative in how we handle the traffic between the sites allowing them to have a much better user experience at a much cheaper cost than their alternatives.

Fiber to the Home – At the last SandyNet Advisory Board meeting we received some direction from the board on how to proceed with the FTTH project. We are working with Fibersphere (who came in with a much more cost effective solution) to negotiate details on a contract that is very specific to the deployment we wish to perform.

We are also preparing materials that will go out to the residents of the neighborhoods in several waves to get their feedback on the project and determine if we have an appropriate amount of interested residents to proceed.

Customer Billings – Customer revenues continue to look promising. We are ahead of projections by a healthy margin for the biennium (click the graphs below for larger view).

IT Department

Virtualization Project – We have run into some software conflicts with the virtual desktop deployment. Fortunately the majority of these conflicts have been overcome and the last major hindrance is scheduled for upgrade in early December. We have several users anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new desktops that have graciously volunteered to be testers.

Staff Report – 10/17/11

Posted on October 11, 2011 by jknapp

STAFF REPORT TO SANDY CITY COUNCIL

MEETING DATE:     10/17/2011
BY:                             Joe Knapp
SUBJECT:                 IT Department – Monthly Report

SandyNet

WiFi – Improvements continue to be made to the WiFi network. We have installed additional backhaul infrastructure in the network bringing our total number of “Root Access Points” (or RAP) up to 50, up from 18 at the beginning of the summer. Each RAP in the mesh network increases the overall speed and capacity of that area of the mesh, so the more we can get the better performance we can provide for our customers. One goal of this biennium is to get all of our WiFi APs converted to RAPs.

The installation service for in city WiFi continues to put a large burden on staff. Our average installations for the past 3 months are over 20 per month.

Rural Wireless – Tower construction on the Waybill tower is progressing nicely. The foundation has been poured and they are expecting to begin installing tower segments on 10/14/2011.

Below is a photo of the foundation when it was formed up, this gives you an idea of the amount of concrete and re-bar that is now buried under structural fill… something on the order of several hundred thousand pounds.

Fiber to the Home – We received two proposals for the FTTH Pilot project. Both of the proposals look very good and seem to indicate that our initial cost projections were fairly accurate. I am working on preparing a detailed comparison of the responses to review with the SandyNet Advisory Board. They will then be able to make recommendations to council as to how to proceed with this project.

We received a lot of interest and encouragement for this project while attending the NATOA conference in San Francisco last month. Hopefully we can return next year with an update on a successful deployment.

Customer Billings – Customer revenues continue to look promising. We are ahead of projections by a healthy margin for the biennium (click the graphs below for larger view).

IT Department

Virtualization Project – Testing of virtual desktops has begun. We have also made progress with Clackamas County to get a point to point VPN in place that will enable us to begin testing the virtual desktop environment for the police department while still allowing them to have access to required county resources.