The man who helmed O-NET while the community-owned, community-wide fibre-optic network was just getting off the ground has resigned.
The man who helmed O-NET while the community-owned, community-wide fibre-optic network was just getting off the ground has resigned.
Lance Douglas, who served as O-NET’s first president and chief executive officer over the past two years, gave his notice to Olds Fibre Ltd.’s board of directors in mid-October.
O-NET is the service provider and marketing brand for Olds Fibre Ltd., a company owned by the Olds Institute for Community and Regional Development.
When asked why Douglas resigned, Mitch Thompson, the institute’s interim executive director, said now that O-NET is up and running—the service officially launched in January—Douglas may have wanted to pursue other challenges.
"I think it’s really just a situation where the organization has grown and he’s one of those passionate people who got to watch and help the organization realize a dream," he said. "But as the organization grew, he himself perhaps had other opportunities he wanted to exercise as well."
Douglas’s departure won’t hurt the service, he added, especially since Olds Fibre Ltd.’s board has named Bill Dunbar, a man with decades of experience in the telecommunications industry, as O-NET’s interim president.
"We feel really good about where we stand," Thompson said.
If you include his time as a radio technician with the Canadian Army, Dunbar has roughly 55 years of experience in telecommunications.
He served as chief executive officer of Northwesttel, a regional telecommunications provider servicing the Northwest Territories, Yukon, Nunavut and northern British Columbia, for more than 30 years and has worked with a number of other companies in Canada and Brazil.
Dunbar, who lives in Airdrie, said he was appointed as interim president after a member of Olds Fibre Ltd.’s board who worked with him when he was at Northwesttel invited him to attend board meetings and assist in a review of the company.
He added he intends to continue with the board’s aim to complete building O-NET’s "fibre-distribution system for the community" and will help the board find a new permanent chief executive officer or president in the next six months.
Joe Gustafson, chair of Olds Fibre Ltd.’s board, said Douglas did not leave because of some of the challenges O-NET is now facing.
He said O-NET is "absolutely behind its targets" for completing installation of its fibre network in town due to weather and a "lack of availability of skilled workers and equipment by contractors in order to get that kind of work done."
"So we certainly are challenged by that and we are going to, without a doubt, disappoint some residents in the community who have signed up for O-NET services and will not get them this fall because of weather."
While weather has hampered O-NET’s efforts to connect its network to parts of the community in the past, Gustafson said the service provider was not expecting for labour and equipment shortages to cause difficulties.
The main problem right now, he added, is more customers are signed up for O-NET’s services than O-NET can hook up and while sales are not an issue, the number of customers paying a monthly bill is "lower than what we’d like them to be."
"That’s not because of lack of community response, that’s lack of our ability to connect them," Gustafson said.
The service provider has plans for "thinking outside the box" to come up with solutions for connecting all those customers who want O-NET to the network as soon as possible, he added.
"Over the winter we have got to come to some kind of resolution to this problem."
O-NET has divided Olds into 11 service areas and so far, the service provider has installed its "distribution fibre" in eight of those areas, meaning there is a conduit from the main fibre line to each property line in those eight districts.
The three areas still needing the distribution fibre are located west of 57 Avenue and south of Highway 27 and in a pocket west of the railroad tracks, east of the Westview Co-op and north of Highway 27.
Gustafson said O-NET’s management made a decision in late spring that there was not enough "physical ability" to install the distribution fibre in those three areas and also complete the last segment of connecting the conduit from the property line to the home in the eight areas where distribution fibre was in place.
The service provider, he said, therefore decided to concentrate on completing work in the eight areas this year—which was accomplished— and then finish distribution work in the last three areas in the spring.
If a labour shortage is still a problem in 2014, Gustafson said, O-NET may need to rely on its own staff to help complete the project.
"We may have to farm out parts of it, maybe directional boring, and then our own staff go in and do fibre deployment."
Gustafson would not provide numbers about how far behind O-NET is in reaching its targets, but he said he is not worried about the service provider’s future.
"I think we’re on target for our business plan, we’re close to being on target for our business plan, but the reality is that everybody that has signed up is not hooked up and therefore our business plan is behind because of that."
Thompson, who just returned from a trade mission to Missouri where he visited with other companies working with fibre networks such as Google, said he also wasn’t concerned with O-NET’s current challenges after seeing how far ahead Olds is in fibre optic service provision.
"I think many of those organizations would be exceptionally happy to be in the situation we are," he said.
Olds Fibre Ltd.’s board is not yet working to find Douglas’s permanent replacement, he added, but will start to "formalize what that new role will look like" in the next six months.
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