Firm makes strides on fiber network

SANDPOINT — Fatbeam made its first water crossing last week as the company continues its 49-mile fiber infrastructure mission for the Lake Pend Oreille School District.

Using a giant spool of cable and a barge, the fiber lines were installed across the Pend Oreille River under the Long Bridge.

"It was pretty cool how they laid it," said Fatbeam CEO Greg Green. "It's a special fiber. It's weighted to protect the fiber and everything — it was quite the process."

Fatbeam was contracted to build a $2.8 million, 49-mile infrastructure for LPOSD's Fiber Wide Area Network throughout the district's 13 locations. The school district’s core buildings in the Ponderay and Sandpoint areas were lit last summer, and Fatbeam is currently working on connecting the rural schools to the network. The fiber at Clark Fork High School will be finished up this month, Green said. With the water crossing, Sagle Elementary will soon be lit and then Fatbeam will continue on to Southside Elementary, which Green said should also be completed this month.

"Ultimately, it will be the first ever, but we will have a fiber network that goes from Sandpoint to Coeur d'Alene, all the way up (Highway) 95, so we are kind of excited about that," Green said.

In addition, he said, the network will eventually run north to the Canadian border, connecting the Boundary County School District as well.

Fatbeam was able to work with the city of Sandpoint to obtain some of the infrastructure it had been installing underground over the course of several years, and also worked with the city to expand the fiber to two businesses, Timberline Helicopters and Tamarack Aerospace, last summer.

While Fatbeam is a company that builds the fiber infrastructure and then leases it to other service providers, it is the service provider for the city. During last week's City Council meeting, council members voted to approve a 20-foot easement just east of the parking lot at War Memorial Field. The easement will allow Fatbeam to bore the fiber line underground through the area and connect to the existing infrastructure.

Currently, said City Administrator Jennifer Stapleton, there is only one fiber optic line that comes into the community.

"That one fiber optic line is feeding most of our internet connections through all the various service providers in the area," Stapleton said.

Since the beginning of the year, Stapleton said there has been three or four times where there has been issues with the line, causing outages for customers. The second line that Fatbeam is installing will help remedy some of those issues, she said, because when there is a problem with one line, network providers will be able to switch over to the other.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.