Telecommunications experts have been watching the developments
at Toronto Hydro Telecom Inc. with avid anticipation ever since
David Dobbin was named president of the Toronto Hydro Corp.
subsidiary in August.
Yesterday's announcement of plans to throw a blanket Wi-Fi
hotzone over the city came as no surprise. Toronto Hydro Telecom is
aiming to cover the downtown core with Wi-Fi access points by the
end of this year, starting with the financial district, and hopes
to build out to its entire municipal jurisdiction within three
years.
As chief operating officer of Telecom Ottawa Inc., Dobbin was
responsible for installing a Wi-Fi network in the capital's
downtown core. Since moving to Toronto, he's been on a hiring spree
that helped lure two key players in the wireless field.
Ian Collins, former president of FibreWired Hamilton, was
appointed vice-president of operations and Sharyn Gravelle, a
former Microcell (Fido) executive, was named vice-president,
wireless, and is responsible for the development, deployment and
maintenance of Toronto Hydro Telecom's Wi-Fi network.
Collins was in charge of engineering a hybrid network of Wi-Fi
and Wi-Max installations in the Hamilton-Wentworth region last
fall. The network was set up to support the Ontario Government's
initiative to install electricity smart meters in every home and
business by 2010.
Providing a communications network for Toronto's smart meters
was one of the clear business drivers for the city's Wi-Fi hotzone,
says Dobbin, whose previous work with Hydro One Telecom involved
setting up municipal-area and wide-area networks in Southern
Ontario before he joined Telecom Ottawa. "We needed a network to
send and receive data for the smart meters and here we are with one
of the largest fibre networks in the city - why not extend it with
Wi-Fi and read the meters that way?"
Dobbin says it was almost all too obvious. He says the second
impetus behind the project came when the City of Toronto sold its
street lighting assets to Toronto Hydro Street Lighting Inc.,
another subsidiary of Toronto Hydro Corp.
Toronto's hotzone will see hundreds and then thousands of radio
antennae attached to the city's streetlight poles, which threw
another learning curveball at Dobbin.
"The Ottawa experience taught me how these things work, how
they're engineered and what kind of traffic to expect," he says.
"But mounting the antennae on streetlight poles was an entirely new
experience."
In Ottawa, Dobbin says the Wi-Fi network was built on the city's
existing hydro poles, but the Toronto Hydro electric system does
not allow radio attachments on hydro poles. "They don't do it, so
we had no option."
Another technical lesson he learned was how to push Wi-Fi's
reach further with a single access point, using multiple
uni-directional antennae rather than one omni-directional
antenna.
Typically a Wi-Fi antenna has a range of anything between 15
metres and 50 metres. In beta tests carried out at Maple Leaf
Gardens, the Toronto Hydro Telecom team was getting almost 300
metres, or up to the ninth floor of an office building or
condominium.
"With an omni-directional antenna, coverage spreads out like a
bubble and it's generally short-range," says Dobbin.
One access point might have as many as 16 antennae all pointed
at very specific directions, which allows coverage to go a lot
further, he says.
Alicia Wanless, an analyst with Toronto-based Seaboard Group,
describes the entrepreneurial Dobbin as a visionary. "The grid he
made in downtown Ottawa was quite exceptional and it's exciting
that he's moved to Toronto. He really thinks big and is quite
capable of doing big things."
But Dobbin is quick to play down his role in the project and
points to his new engineering staff. "We brought in the wireless
talent to get us through," he says. "At the end of the day, I'm a
fibre guy." He says he wants Toronto Hydro Telecom to work with the
established telcos such as Rogers, Bell and Telus, as a member of
the Canadian Hotspot Roaming Alliance.
"Now is not the time for competitive chest-pumping," says
Dobbin.
"We're building this to make it available in the city of Toronto
and I think all of the carriers should be working together to
ensure [users] have access to the technology. We're building the
zone, let's work together."
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