On the Edge | Beneath Saint John’s Streets is a Highway of Glass

By: Lisa Hrabluk

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Part 2 in a series on Saint John’s ICT story.

Beneath Saint John’s streets is a highway of glass.

Fibre optic cables, laid by NBTel in the 1990s, provides a level of high speed access unmatched in any other city in Canada to this day.

NBTel’s strategy was simple: the traditional phone business was changing and the days of selling hardware were over. The next generation would belong to companies that could provide solutions. Initially, that drive to lay cable was born from the need to provide ICT solutions for customer contact firms such as Xerox, Air Canada and IBM. However by the mid-1990s three other factors were driving growth in broadband research and development in Saint John.

The first was economic. The region’s major employers needed to increase productivity and provide improved services to customers – through ICT solutions.

The second factor was public policy. All three levels of government (federal, provincial and municipal) were early supporters of NBTel’s drive to innovate, first as advocates, then as clients and, in the case of the federal government, an early – and important – investor in start-up technology.

The third factor in broadband innovation was competition. The local market was simply too small to drive business growth, so NBTel’s sales force looked outside New Brunswick to market its broadband technology, specifically to other telecommunications companies in Canada and the United States.

Locally, Fundy Cable, owned by Saint John entrepreneur Bill Stanley, was the first cable company in Canada to push into phone services.

By 1999 Saint John was the battleground between two former monopoly utilities determined to evolve into nimble ICT innovators. To achieve this, Fundy Cable invested in a province-wide hybrid fibre cable system, making New Brunswick the only jurisdiction in North America to have two fibre optic systems.

By 2000 Saint John was the most technologically advanced broadband community in North America.

If the 1990s was about laying down the fibre, the first decade of the 21st century has been about harnessing the content. Bell Aliant’s new generation of broadband services, FibreOp, is Canada’s first 100 per cent fibre-optic network and its fastest. It led the City of Saint John and Bell Aliant to work together to develop solutions for municipal services that are born in Saint John and and which can be marketed globally.

Saint John is home to the world’s first hosted telephony system that integrates digital phone services with Microsoft’s Lync Server. This system allows municipal workers to phone, text, instant message, email and share data across phones and computers at all municipal sites. This small city is able to integrate significant digital systems because it doesn’t have to pay to develop the fibre infrastructure – NBTel and Aliant already did it.

That network enabled the Saint John Police Force to be one of the first in Canada to adopt an intelligent policing strategy, which uses ICT to identify, analyze and then manage high-risk neighbourhoods and crimes. It was one of the first municipal forces to install mobile devices in squad cars and in 2012, the force will move into a fully networked police headquarters, the most advanced in the region. Intelligent policing helped the police force determine where to locate community policing centres, how to staff patrols and how to work with the community to reduce crime and improve quality of life in the city’s high-crime neighbourhoods.

Back down on Saint John streets, citizens and small businesses interact online, particularly with social media sites Facebook and Twitter, and today a strong concentration of retail shops, restaurants and bars are managing relationships online.

Proof that when private sector innovation meets informed public policy, it is possible to change a culture.