Access The City of Calgary's dark fibre
In order to deliver next-generation services to Calgarians, The City has been increasing its fibre optic footprint. Our primary focus is to connect all City buildings, facilities and assets.
The City licenses its excess dark fibre to organizations like yours to encourage innovation, economic growth and competition within our community.
Your organization can access existing municipal fibre infrastructure to build your own secure high-speed network within Calgary and to connect to the world.
When you license dark fibre, you are able to:
- Build and manage your own network.
- Control network security, performance, and costs.
- Provide high quality and consistent network services within your company and to your customers.
- Gain access to a variety of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and carriers.
Contact us
To learn more about The City’s dark fibre, please contact David.Basto@calgary.ca and request a consultation.
Fibre connectivity benefits many industries and organizations, such as:
- Civic partners and non-profits in arts, culture, recreation, library services and others.
- Education (e.g. schools boards and universities)
- Health care (e.g. hospital and clinics)
- Technology (e.g. data centres, ISPs and carriers)
- Commercial businesses
What is dark fibre?
Fibre optic cable securely carries vast amounts of information as light pulses at high speeds. “Dark” fibre is unused fibre optic cable infrastructure. The fibre becomes lit when an organization attaches network equipment and transfer data between points.
About City fibre infrastructure
As we deploy our fibre network, excess capacity is created for future needs.
Features of City fibre:
- Network/operator-neutral (open access).
- Over 400 kms of fibre reaching all quadrants of the city.
- Network speeds and capacity are virtually unlimited.
- Support is available 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The City fibre network does not provide:
- Internet services
- Residential retail service
- Network and electronic equipment
Dark fibre connection types and pricing
Connect your business
The City’s dark fibre can be used to connect your business in the following ways:
- Business to business
- Business to data centre
- Data center to data centre
- Wireless tower to data centre
Research initiatives
The City provides dark fibre access to research groups in order to support the growth of new technologies and innovative services. For example, read more about the collaboration with The University of Calgary's quantum encryption researchers.
Related documents
- Calgary fibre optic services price list
- Fibre license agreement
- Maintenance of fibres
- Performance specifications
Customer use cases
Feedback from our customers is overwhelmingly positive. They appreciate the dark fibre service offering and align with the City’s vision to serve Calgarians.
Cybera
Cybera is a not-for-profit, technical agency that is helping Alberta advance its IT frontiers. CyberaNet is Alberta’s publicly-funded, ultra-high-speed network that moves big data between the province’s education institutions, researchers and IT entrepreneurs, and provincial, national and international research networks.
Cybera began utilizing the City’s dark fibre infrastructure over five years ago to provide direct connectivity to the University of Calgary, MRU, SAIT, BVC, and Calgary Catholic School District. This connectivity enabled them to reduce internet costs and gain access to new digital services and applications. Students and researchers can now carry out projects involving data intensive video/design projects and collaborate on more international research projects.
“It is very clear from our dealings with The City of Calgary that the public’s interest is the main driver for this initiative. This aligns perfectly with Cybera’s mandate, and makes our dealings run smoothly. For our peers and members, who all serve the public interest, there can be no better partner.”
– Robin Windsor, President & CEO, Cybera
Calgary Public Library
Calgary Public Library has been using the City of Calgary fibre network since 2013. Initially, the fibre network was used to move the library data centres after the 2013 floods. Since the initial installation, the use has expanded to include the Village Square Library and most recently, the Nicolls Family Library at Westbrook Station.
We have found the network to be extremely reliable and the City staff excellent to work with. We continue to look for opportunities to further this partnership as we build new locations and fibre becomes available to existing facilities. We believe that this partnership is an excellent example of maximizing tax payer investments, allowing for the best possible service to Calgarians.
University of Calgary
The University of Calgary is leading the world in quantum encryption research. Quantum encryption and technologies will play an important role in computer and networking in the decades to come.
The research team was excited to learn of the City’s dark fibre to enable them to conduct the testing they required. The City provided access to dark fibre and space in some facilities for test equipment. This ability to test in the real world has created a lot of visibility for the University of Calgary and may draw future research in this field.
“Being able to use the City’s dark fibre has enabled our team to successfully test out our quantum encryption theories and we look forward to working with the City in the future. This has allowed us to reach a major milestone in our research that we couldn’t have accomplished without access to dark fibre.”
- Wolfgang Tittel, Professor and AITF Strategic Research Chair in Quantum Secured Communication
Watch video and read the Tech Times article "Researchers beam light particle across fiber network, sets quantum teleportation record"
Contact us
To learn more about The City’s dark fibre, please contact David.Basto@calgary.ca and request a consultation.