Biking and Broadband

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were mountain biking at Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trails, a 50-mile trail system in the Iron Range of northcentral Minnesota. These trails are an easy 30-minute drive from our home, located in a rural area of Minnesota. They are built on an old, abandoned iron ore mine that was active until 1984. The 50 miles of red dirt trails (red from the iron in the dirt) are one of our favorite things about the area we live in. 15 years ago when we first moved to the area, there was one two-way mountain bike trail around one of the mine lakes and there weren’t many people on the trail. Sometimes we’d have the trail all to ourselves.

There are two towns near Cuyuna, Crosby and Ironton, frequently referred to as Crosby-Ironton. When we first moved here, Crosby-Ironton looked like a ghost town. Stores were abandoned and shuttered. There was one restaurant in town which had seen better days and there was rarely a car on the road. It was a sad, abandoned, rural Minnesota town.

Fifteen years later, with 50 miles of trails, yurts, picnic areas, terrain parks, mountain bike learning areas, and more, Cuyuna has become a mountain biking destination, at least in the State of Minnesota. We don’t even bother going to Cuyuna on the weekend in the summer unless we go early in the morning because it’s so crowded.

The mountain bike crowds brought people to Crosby-Ironton and a revitalization to the community. There are microbreweries, several restaurants, trendy loft hotels, a gourmet cheese and ice cream shop, and lots of tourist shops. The creation of a mountain bike state park has truly revitalized the community.

As I was biking that day, I kept thinking about how much this town has changed since we started coming here and the parallels I’ve seen as I’ve witnessed broadband deployments in rural communities in Minnesota. I’ve seen communities transformed and invigorated by fiber deployments in the area I live in including one of the most remote areas of Minnesota – Cook County – the arrowhead of Minnesota, the triangular region along the northern part of Lake Superior and Canada. Starting in 2010, the local electric utility, Arrowhead Electric Cooperative, in conjunction with Consolidated Telecommunications Cooperative (CTC) built fiber to the home in their service area, an area with only seven meters per mile and in the most underserved broadband area of Minnesota.

It transformed the community. People want to live there. I mean, people wanted to live there before, it’s one of the most beautiful areas of Minnesota and my favorite area, but now people CAN live there and work there. Businesses thrive and towns have come back to life. While I watched the revitalization of the North Shore area from afar and as a tourist, I got to see it more in action when my sister and Brother-In-Law purchased a resort on the Gunflint Trail. Gunflint Lodge sits near the end of the Gunflint Trail, a sparsely populated now highway (formerly just a dirt trail) that ends near Canada. Their resort is literally across a lake from Canada and one of the most remote places I’ve been. The closest town is Grand Marais, 50 miles from their lodge and formerly also the closest cell tower, so very limited communications. However, thanks to the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) project a few years earlier, there was fiber to the resort when they purchased it. People go to Gunflint Lodge to disconnect from life and work and to truly be in nature. At the same time, my sister and Brother-in-Law can run a state-of-the-art resort with all the technology, social media, and connectivity needed.

With COVID and the ability to work remotely and with the broadband connectivity that is in place, that area of Minnesota has truly grown and thrived. Communities in the area have been revitalized. They are busy and bustling (sometimes a little too much in my opinion).

Whatever the reason for small towns coming back to life – whether it’s broadband or biking, or both, it’s great to see rural communities reinvigorated and thriving again.

Utility Telecom Technology - What’s in Your Portfolio

A couple weeks ago, I posted about spectrum options for utilities' telecommunications networks. Today I want to talk about technologies utilities have to choose from to build those networks. Spectrum and technologies go hand in hand and have to be considered together (unless you're doing a wired solution, which I also talk about in here).

Years ago, most communications solutions utilities had as options were proprietary solutions using narrow channel spectrum or wired copper circuits. I am happy that things have progressed significantly in the 30 years I've been an engineer. There are now many technologies, some standard, some proprietary, utilities have in their portfolio as they consider how to build or migrate their networks.

These technologies typically fit into wired, and wireless: narrowband, wideband, and broadband. And, in my mind of great importance, there are standard technologies that utilities can deploy. In one of my previous roles as a utility engineer, we used a proprietary technology and the manufacturer eventually went out of business forcing the utility I worked for at the time to do a forklift replacement. No one wants to be forced into a system replacement. I had been a proponent of standards before that happened, but there weren't standards in the spectrum band we had access to. I became an even bigger proponent of standards when that happened.

Today, utilities have access to a number of wireless technology standards. For narrowband technologies there are a number of standard technologies that typically support both voice and limited amounts of data.

Wideband technologies are typically proprietary although there is IEEE 802.16 - 2017 which is an open standard. With limited manufacturers, however, it hasn't reached its full potential.

Broadband technologies, LTE and 5G, are global standards with many, many manufacturers both for commercial devices and utility specific devices.

It's great to see the progression in technology and spectrum alternatives utilities have in their portfolios. As a utility explores their network migrations, having an understanding of spectrum and technology alternatives is critical. Most of the available technologies are highlighted in the slides attached. There is A LOT of detail behind each of these solutions which is not brought out here in a few short slides. Feel free to message me if you'd like additional information .

RF Spectrum - What’s In Your Portfolio?

I like to think of RF spectrum and technology for utilities as a portfolio of potential solutions. As a utility, you want a big portfolio so you have as many options as possible to enable you to make the best decision for spectrum and technology for your utility. In most cases, the best solution for one utility is not necessarily the best solution for another.

So, what's in that portfolio to choose from?

Today, we dive into the spectrum portfolio and look at what spectrum bands are available for utilities. Spectrum is the foundation for utilities to build the wireless networks utilities use to underpin grid modernization. Selecting the right spectrum for a utility's geography, morphology, service area, and use cases is critical in building a reliable network.

When I started out as a young telecommunications engineer, spectrum was pretty simple - you went to the FCC, paid $50 and leased a channel for 10 years (more or less - it was slightly more complicated). Since 1993, the FCC has auctioned spectrum and spectrum has become very competitive with the most desirable spectrum being purchased by commercial providers for billions of dollars. So, where does that leave utilities? For many years that left utilities building their networks that support the electric grid with less than optimal spectrum.

However, in recent years, utilities have had access to a variety of spectrum bands from low frequencies to higher frequencies, from narrowband to broadband. All of these options come with a price (i.e. narrowband spectrum is less costly than broadband spectrum) and a variety of technologies that are supported, from proprietary to standards such as LTE.

What is narrowband spectrum? What is wideband spectrum? What is broadband spectrum? What spectrum bands do utilities have access to? This is a high level overview of the utility spectrum portfolio of RF spectrum in the United States (all countries are different). There are a variety of spectrum owners and a variety of manufacturers that make equipment for these bands. If you'd like more information on spectrum, spectrum owners, and technology providers, please contact me.

Selecting the right spectrum for your utility network is one of the most important (and possibly most expensive) decisions you will make. It is foundational to building a reliable communications network to support your utility grid.

Why Do Utilities Need Private Networks?

Utilities have used private networks for many decades, long before public wireless carriers existed. While public carriers make communications easier and more accessible, mission critical use cases still require private communications in order to meet four specific requirements:

SECURITY | Safety and protection are of primary importance, for employees as well as the public, since extreme harm can result if a mission-critical infrastructure is hacked in any way. Access to the network needs to be restricted to ensure only authorized personnel can get into the network, and data transmissions need to be encrypted, to prevent tampering, theft, or, worse yet, acts of sabotage or terrorism.

RELIABILITY | Communication with personnel and devices needs to go through, without interference, even if transmission and reception take place in rural or remote areas.

AVAILABILITY | These critical networks cannot afford down time. The goal of 100% network availability may only be attainable in theory, but a standard for today’s mission-critical networks is 99.999% availability, which equates to five minutes of downtime per year. Few, if any commercial networks offer this level of availability. Even 99.99% availability, which equates to 52 minutes of downtime per year, is not a level of service commercial carriers and their publicly available, consumer focused network products are willing to provide.

LATENCY | Control and signaling communications sent to and from remote devices must be delivered without delay, at extremely low latency rates. When performing tasks such as remotely controlling oil or gas flow and equipment, switching a power line, controlling a circuit breaker, or sending a stop command to an out-of-control train, the signal needs to be transmitted in a fraction of a second, but commercial networks can never guarantee latency rates this low.

Commercial public cellular networks simply don’t offer the levels of reliability, availability, latency, and security that mission-critical services require. Designed primarily for the consumer market, commercial cellular networks tend to focus the majority of their resources on urban, more populated areas, where consumers use high-bandwidth connections.