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By Maurice Bridge
Originally Published: November 7th, 2001
By: The Vancouver Sun
Theresa Carbonneau is on the roof of a building in a
Richmond industrial park, smiling for the camera as a sharp
southwest wind chills her. She doesn't seem to mind.
She's president and CEO of fSONA Communications Corporation,
and after five years of turning an idea into a corporate
reality, a little cold isn't that hard to take.
fSONA is picking up where a substantial chunk of the
high-technology industry left off. Fibre-optic technology,
with its huge capacity for moving information at high speed,
has been touted as the future of the Information Age. But in
recent years, overbuilding by fibre-optic cable companies
and the collapse of the high-tech bubble has seen a number
of fibre-optic companies go bust, and more than 90 per cent
of the cable remains idle.
One of the stumbling blocks is the so-called Golden Mile --
the final mile or so which separates about 90 per cent of
buildings which have fibre-optic cable in them from the
fibre-optic backbone that could connect them with the rest
of the world. Bob Kehr, fSONA's chief operating officer,
nails it in a single sentence: "It's like when they built
the information highway, they forgot the off-ramps and
on-ramps."
Despite the promise that fibre optics offers, the disruption
caused by digging up streets to make the connection has been
enough to make some cities -- San Diego and London among
others -- either impose a moratorium or think seriously
about it. In January, the Canadian Radio-television and
Telecommunications Commission rejected an attempt by the
City of Vancouver and other Canadian municipalities to
collect tens of millions of dollars a year in fees from
companies that wanted to install fibre optics under city
streets.
However, the CRTC did allow municipalities to collect hard
costs such as paperwork at city hall, repaving roads and
making up for lost revenue from parking meters. For that,
Vancouver will work a deal or charge a flat fee of $10 per
metre, meaning the Golden Mile will cost $160,000 before the
holes are dug or the cable is even purchased. The fees the
CRTC stopped it from collecting (the decision is under
appeal) were around $20 per metre.
fSONA's technology literally jumps over all that: It uses
laser technology to link fiber-optic networks by using
line-of-sight transmitter receivers that operate 100 times
faster than the T-1 lines offered by most telephone
companies. The retail cost is around $30,000 --
approximately 10 per cent of the total cost of digging
through the streets.
The system can operate from rooftops or even through glass.
"If you have two businesses with windows facing each other,
we could set it up in an afternoon," says Kehr, an
aeronautical engineer who spent 20 years with the U.S. Air
Force before joining the high-tech industry.
Equally attractive, especially in light of the appeal of the
CRTC decision, is the fact that unlike radio-frequency
systems, optical wireless-based communications systems
require no licensing. They do, however, need to meet
industry standards that guarantee they won't damage the
vision of people who pass through the beam. fSONA uses a
1,550-nanometer wavelength which meets eye-safe standards
and also allows it to put a lot more power behind the
signal, so that rain, fog and passing seagulls don't
interrupt the signal. The units on the roof of fSONA's
headquarters send and receive data across as much as five
kilometers.
Carbonneau, who worked a a telecom executive in England
before coming to Canada at the end of 1988 with her new
husband, saw the market for the technology while she was
working with B.C. Tel. "It was always a push to get fibre,
it was always a push to go to the next level and this was
really a no-brainer, because there really is no alternative
right now."
In 1995, she took the plunge, dropping the day job and
digging into research. The original technology fSONA uses
(the name stands for free space optical networking
architecture) was developed in England, and she licensed it
from her old employer, British Telecom, in 1997. Since then,
she has built a team of about 70, pulling in experts from
around the world. While she wouldn't mind seeing lower taxes
for her highly-educated crew, she says a strong team
approach keeps the operation vital: "It was a mixture of the
exciting technology application -- it really is at the
forefront of wireless technology, there aren't that many
companies in the world doing it -- and the team that we
have."
Private investors have underwritten their efforts to the
tune of $27 million so far, and Carbonneau and Kehr expect
the company will be profitable around the end of next year,
or the beginning of 2003. fSONA made its first sales in May
of this year, and now has about 50 installations around the
world.
As the sales effort ramps up, Carbonneau is spending long
hours on the road. She says she has about five serious
competitors worldwide, and she plans to stay ahead of them.
On Friday, she was in San Francisco; this week, it's Boston.
But she doesn't miss working for someone else, and she
remains as charged-up about her business as she did when she
started it.
"I love this sector, I love it very much -- the telecom
industry, the opportunities in it -- and this technology is
just the most perfect technology for it."
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