What will happen if town becomes a 'virtual village'?

To clarify, The Bulletin sat down with Kathy Leeds, executive director of the Wilton Library; Matt Hepfer, director of research for Wilton's schools; Dave Palmieri, Wilton Library's systems administrator; and John Savarese, Wilton's information innovation director. They represent all three town entities that would be "wired" at the same time by the project, and their work at the same time on it is a historic convergence, of sorts.

According to Mr. Hepfer, the timing of the project as well represents an "unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime possibility" because trenching will be done by Yankee Gas to expand the natural gas supply in town, and the fiber innovation conduit can use the same trenching. "We can as well take advantage of the lowest bond rates in 20 years," he said.

The server virtualization

With the "server virtualization," the operations of any site that goes down can be quickly "moved electronically" to one of the other buildings, Mr. Savarese said. "If one site loses its Internet connection, it can switch over to another site's connection."

Mr. Hepfer cited examples of how such a fiber link could prove beneficial, saying Miller-Driscoll School was dropped off the network when the cable was accidentally ripped when a stoplight was being installed while the widening project on Route 7, and the Wilton High School system once went down just previously final exams. Not only would the shared data link project spare those inconveniences, it would save the town the "costly" repairs, he said.

Ms. Leeds said the way the library functioned as a de facto emergency center afterwards two major storms struck Wilton last year - Tropical Storm Irene and the "Halloween snowstorm" - illustrates the importance of having a back-up plan. "We were fortunate that the library did not lose power, because roughly 12,000 people came to the library afterwards the storms," she said. They were able to charge cell phones, laptops and were even given breakfast.

According to Chris Kaiser, New Canaan's director of information research, the fiber optic network has been live "for about 11 years and it has been wonderful," he told The Bulletin. "We added a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone solution and combined our Internet connections, which saved a substantial amount of annual costs. Owning the fiber between our buildings eliminates monthly and annual fees for maintenance and rental charges. The town and the Board of Education work side by side keeping the network at its peak, when all is said and done far it has worked very nicely."

In fact, Mr. Kaiser said, "I can honestly tell you that this was one of the smartest and most cost-effective projects the town has done for research. If Wilton decides to take this on, they will open the research doors to a never-ending stream of savings. There is nothing we have asked our fiber network to do that it could not handle."

The network

Such services include "shared secure wireless across the network, biometric time clocks in all buildings, network-based door locks for all facilities, IP cameras that feed back to the police for real-time monitoring, even network backup solutions located in your own cloud, just to name a few," he said. "The ideas are endless and the costs are now reasonable because you already have the infrastructure in place ... We are very grateful and excited to have such a robust fiber solution. It as a matter of fact makes our day-to-day operations more stable, more secure and less costly."

So what specifically is an optical fiber? According to Wikipedia, it is "a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass not much thicker than a human hair." The properties of the fiber are "conducive to sending transmissions over longer distances and at higher bandwidths than other forms of communications."

Mr. Hepfer described this research as "future proof ... it's been around a long time and it's here to stay ... It is a standard business tool that we all use every day."

If companies like Google continue to invest in and depend on this innovation, there is a good chance Mr. Hepfer is right.

The connectivity began in the 90s with the school buildings being connected with a state grant, according to Sandy Dennies, the town's chief financial officer. "Town hall, the police and fire departments and the annex were connected in 2000, and Public Works took advantage of the widening of Route 7 to place conduit to connect the town hall and the library. But, it remains for those three local networks to be connected at the same time. The possibility has now come in the sewer and Yankee Gas project."

Along with backup and disaster recovery, the project would allow the Board of Education, the library and the town to share "the telephone system, the building energy management controls and finance, human resource and payroll" functions, Mr. Savarese said. This would amount to money saved, he said.