News and Features
Building a Virtual Vancouver
By Frances Bula published Jul 19, 2012
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Vancouver is going to change the world, creating virtual marketplaces and cloud democracy. But first we have to build the infrastructure
On Canada Way, in a building so boring it almost fades from view, a powerhouse company is assembling the future. There's no sign of jetpacks or quantum generators (sadly), just the emerald-green circuit boards, silver-stitched with wiring, that we recognize as the building blocks of the modern era. Our world is made of more than concrete sewer pipes or asphalt roads, more than bridges, heavy metal lampposts, garbage trucks, and landfills. Municipal infrastructure depends equally on those circuit boards, which Webtech Wireless technician Joy Li is quality-testing for use in locator boxes that can report exactly where a given vehicle is. With them installed on a dashboard, transit systems can calculate, through algorithms on expected traffic patterns, when a bus is likely to arrive at a stop (as opposed to when the schedule says it should arrive). That's a level of service that companies and customers these days increasingly take for granted. Consumers want the information that distributors have: they don't want to wait around just guessing when the recycling truck will pass or the next grocery delivery will arrive. "If you're under 25, you think everything is an app," says David Greer, Webtech's marketing vice-president. What gets missed, though, is the vast invisible infrastructure that makes it all possible.
That infrastructure-the cables and antennas that cellphones and wifi and cloud computing rely on-has been an ongoing challenge for municipalities. Vancouver has been wrestling with the buildout of telecommunication hardware since the '80s. At heart, of course, is money. Almost since the beginning of the cellphone revolution, telecoms have routinely torn up streets to install fibre-optic cables, then left the city to patch it all up. When they're not tunnelling through the streets, they're bolting antennas to rooftops or towers.
Such blights on the landscape-and our impatience with the unsightliness-will only worsen. The world is exploding with data use (which everyone wants), but it requires physical boxes and towers to transmit it (which no one wants). In the '90s, when Telus (then BC Tel) served all of Metro Vancouver's cellphone users with a handful of transmission sites, each transmitter could broadcast 19.2 kilobytes per second. At the time, it seemed plenty enough.
