City of Kelowna Signs First Company to Dark Fibre Network

Canada’s largest cloud service provider is the first to sign on the City of Kelowna’s dark fibre network. RackForce was started in Kelowna in 2001 and has now branched out to offer services to many customers nationally and internationally.

Dark fibre refers to unused fiber-optic cable. The City’s dark fibre offering has no limits on bandwidth, so organizations such as RackForce can move large amounts of data at high speeds for a flat monthly fee to the City of Kelowna.

“We’re so pleased to have this extremely successful, leading-edge company as the first to join the City’s dark fibre network,” said Kelowna Mayor Colin Basran. “Kelowna is among a handful of cities in B.C. that offer dark fibre to businesses and institutions. Combined with the Okanagan lifestyle, this affordable telecommunications infrastructure makes Kelowna an attractive place to start-up, grow or relocate businesses that need to move large amounts of data.”

Over the past six years, Kelowna installed a 13-kilometre backbone of fibre optics between 11 city facilities for a cost savings of about $155,000 per year in telecommunications bills. The network was purposely over-built to include extra optic fibre that could one day be leased to businesses.

"This is for customers that have massive amounts of data to move,” said City of Kelowna Infrastructure Systems Manager Brian Abrey. “The City does not provide phone, television or internet service on this fibre, but can provide a dedicated high-speed connection from one point to another on the City fibre network. We are pleased to be able to have RackForce’s world class facility as our first customer.”

Caption: Mayor Colin Basran and RackForce President and CEO Tim Dufour at the company's facility in Kelowna.

Photo credit: contributed.

RackForce took an interest in utilizing Kelowna’s dark fibre as they provide internet service for larger customers requiring data capacity of 100Mb per second to one Gb per second.

“Our company was interested in using this service ever since we were informed about it,” said Tim Dufour, President and CEO of RackForce. “It allows RackForce to bring world-class cloud services to local business at significantly lower costs for Internet and other IT services connected to the new Kelowna fibre network.”

Abrey expects other local businesses to begin joining the network in the months ahead.

Kelowna is British Columbia’s third-largest technology hub and the City of Kelowna is working with partners to expand this clean, knowledge-based sector. Economic development research estimates tech-sector revenues in the Okanagan for 2014 at more than $850 million, a 42 per cent increase over 2013.

The Okanagan has more than 300 technology companies, an annual labour force growth rate of four per cent, and more than 6,500 workers in the field Okanagan-wide.