Toronto is in the grip of a heat wave, but few are as a hot as Stream Intelligent Networks Corp.
The Toronto-based company has signed an agreement with O&Y Enterprise to allow owners of its buildings to offer tenants access to Stream’s broadband network.
Stream connects buildings with fibre optic cable and provides wholesale data services to telephone and Internet companies and other customers. Earlier this summer it signed a deal with Everest Broadband Networks Canada to supply high-speed access facilities to Everest’s commercial buildings in Toronto, and another with The Town of Richmond Hill, Ont. to install fibre optic network in the sewer system.
Craig White, Stream vice-president, network implementation, says under the terms of the national agreement it will rent space in O&Y’s buildings, but won’t reveal the price. While the scope of the deal is national, most O&Y customers outside the greater Toronto area (GTA) will have to wait.
White says it is concentrating on the southern Ontario, but “we would go to other cities, other buildings as there was a demand request and it made business sense to do so.”
O&Y tenants will be serviced through a hybrid fibre/wireless architecture. White says given line-of-sight it can connect to other buildings from buildings with fibre.
“It’s like fibre in the sky — an OC3 (155.52 Mbps) signal,” says White.
“We can deliver different payloads with it. We can either deliver TDM-based services. . . or we can configure it and deliver 100Base-T for transparent LAN services or gigabit Ethernet.”
O&Y manages about 50 properties in the GTA and Eric Yap, manager, national telecommunications, says its tenants have been asking for this kind of service.
“In many ways they’re trying to provision it themselves. Some of the larger tenants, like the banks, have had very sophisticated data needs for some time now, and really they’ve been deploying their own networks,” says Yap.
“They’re quite sophisticated, but we have a lot of small and medium businesses that just do not have the expertise to get this type of solution at a cost-effective price.”
The search to find a company that fit its needs was a short one. Yap says no one else in Canada had the same offering.
“They’re a MAN (metropolitan area network) provider, they’re a network provider. The other ones were providing the actual voice or data services, whereas Stream provides the network and then you decide how you want to use that.”
