A year after Northwestern renegotiated an agreement with the city of Evanston — in which the university installed fiber optics cable between 15 city buildings in exchange for a discount on its annual payments — city and university officials reported the deal was a mutual success.
The agreement saves NU $50,000 to $100,000 a year for the next 20 years and replaced an older agreement that came to an end last October.
Administrators wanted to expand university fiber optics systems and were able to renegotiate for a “bit of a break on the charges of the easement agreement” in return for installing fiber optics capabilities in 15 major Evanston buildings, according to Ald. Edmund Moran (6th). Fiber optics cables facilitate communication technology and are more powerful and secure than traditional cables.
Eugene Sunshine, senior vice president for business and finance, said NU wanted to expand its fiber optics system to off-campus locations like Welsh-Ryan Arena, which would benefit from faster communications, and create backup fiber optics between the university and 2020 Ridge Ave., which houses some of NU’s computer operations.
“Good practice dictated that we have a second connection to that building just to give us redundancy, a backup system if something happened to the main fiberoptic system,” he said.
The university benefits by saving enough money annually to eventually “recover most of the cost” of installing the new fiber optics systems, Sunshine said.
“Instead of paying the $50,000 to $100,000, it’s now saved, and that allows us to pay for in savings what we otherwise would have had to pay,” Sunshine said.
The renegotiation also helped the city, Moran said.
“It gives us a speed and a volume in terms of transferring data that is way, way beyond anything we’ve had before,” Moran said. “It gives us a system that is more durable and much more in the way of state-of-the-art than we’ve had previously. And obviously we got it for a much smaller amount of money that we’d have had to invest otherwise.”
Evanston’s five firehouses, the police station, the civic center and other main buildings now have a much faster and more secure connection than they did before, said Bruce Sloan, director of information services for the city. He said the fiber optics cables can transmit a billion bits per second, as opposed to the system’s previous speed of four million bits per second.
“As opposed to cables that run on poles, we have an underground system that’s much safer,” he said. “It’s much more reliable.”
Sloan said the city had planned to install fiber optics capabilities in its buildings, but the university’s involvement facilitated the process, so the renegotiations were a “win-win” situation.
“Getting the funds together and the speeds at which we’d have done it with would have taken longer,” he said.
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