Mar/2011

Canela city, in Rio Grande do Sul state – a town with more then 40 thousand residents and 60% of its income coming from tourism – made history today by becoming a Digital City model in Brazil. "It’s not only providing internet services in town and for the community, says Paulo Kapp, Telebrás Director, when talking about the project that works for the digital inclusion of Brazilian cities, especially those which are far from urban centers and capitals.

The Digital City project, according to Kapp, aims at providing quality public services by using fiber optic network with high availability for traffic data, voice and image. From the unified medical record of a patient to the monitoring of public environments by security agents, and management of school information at the Education Department, all of these are services that benefit the entire local community. "And since the city is a tourism center, the completion of Canela’s digital network was very satisfying once this will certainly benefit the hotels and the tourists themselves, and this project is a model to be followed by more than 160 cities around the country in the next years", says Kapp.

The model adopted as reference for the Digital City projects, created by the Brazilian Government through the Ministry of Communication and Telebrás, was presented by Marco Boemeke, Datacom’s New Businesses Directors and representative of the consortium of companies that implemented the fiber optic network in Canela. According to Boemeke, “The network is comprised of a high speed fiber optic ring (1Gbps) under Metro Ethernet technology, which connects the main traffic generator departments in the municipal government, such as city hall, secretariats, house of representatives, tele-centers, etc., forming the “network’s heart”. The implementation in the shape of a loop also adds reliability to the system since it provides path redundancy in the event a fiber breaks”. According to the executive, distribution towers are connected to this ring in Wi-Max technology (wireless), which allows extending the network to remote locations with little traffic density, forming a high capability and wide coverage to serve public areas, schools far from downtown, health care facilities in the outskirts and tele-surveillance spots in various locations in town, which will be used by the Military Police for on-line patrol, where they can identify incidents and monitor places that require more control from the police force.

The topology of the network implemented in Canela city (RS) handles from user access to high complexity services, such as Conference Calls, Telemedicine, VoIP, Video Monitoring, within a solid and safe infrastructure. “The infrastructure is also prepared to serve the city’s administration with high quality and availability, such as education, health, transportation, security, and tourism management systems, promoting the modernization of public management and digital inclusion, which will translate into actual benefits for our citizens” concludes Boemeke.

For Canela’s mayor, Constantino Orsolin, "now the goal is to complement the network with phases 2 and 3, getting to the community directly, which will have free access as a result of an agreement to be signed between the city hall and a local internet provider. The main task was to install the optic fiber ring in the city’s central region, which is already operating and available for public agents, schools, the police, the department of justice, and also for tourism. Now we are moving to phases 2 and 3, expanding the network and offering service for the most remote regions in town, including tourism attractions, such as Caracol Falls”, completes Orsolin.

The use of the implemented network by Five Brazilian companies, and already operating, was shown during a launch event with two conference calls between the local theater, where the ceremony took place, and a municipal school and a health care center, with the participation of the city’s Health and Education Department Secretaries. After watching the conference calls in real time with high technical quality, the representative of the Ministry of Communications, Lygia Puppato, said that “the mayor took up a historical challenge by turning Canela into a digital city, providing increased quality of life to its community and benefitting the industry and tourism, which responds for more than 50% of the city’s social and economical development”. Also within the digital inclusion program promoted by Canela City Hall, 280 notebooks were handed out to children from a municipal school that integrates Pró-Uca by the Ministry of Education.

Picture: Agência Office Press