Seguin Fiber Expansion

Fiber expansion has been a journey over the past few years in Seguin, Texas. Today, I am proud to proclaim that all but one of the city’s facilities is connected to city owned fiber. The remaining facility, a wastewater treatment plant on the edge of town, will be connected to the ring alongside a lift station via a $200M expansion project that will come online as part of the technology plan for the project. Assuming the effort stays on schedule, in 2025 Seguin will have 32 city facilities in total connected to its fiber ring.

When I arrived in the spring of 2018, the fiber ring did not exist. About half of the facilities were running on fiber, but it was direct connections with no resiliency in the event of failure. The city was operating on three data centers with no interconnection between them. The city was also leveraging a flat network with static routes dictating traffic management. No layer three, no intelligent management. Four years ago, 80% of the city facilities could have been taken down by a single downed pole or an overly aggressive squirrel.

I started in the middle of the fiscal year with a preapproved capital budget item for $50k labeled only as “fiber study.” With that in mind, we began engaging for quotes to do just that on behalf of the city. To no surprise, the quotes came back at or around $50k. Feeling as though we didn’t need to pay someone to tell us what we already knew needed to be done, in true hardheaded fashion we bypassed the study and proceeded to build the fiber ring to our own vision.

The $50k was immediately used to purchase several miles of 72 strand single mode fiber and all associated hardware to make aerial runs. The first run was completed interconnecting the three data centers alongside a yearlong effort to break down and rebuild the original flat network. Early on a Saturday morning in June of 2019, Seguin IT made the migration onto the new network, and just like that the city had data traversing a datacenter ring via layer three routing.

An additional seventeen facilities have been added to the ring since 2019. We’ve added water towers, substations, booster pump stations, and fire stations. We left the radio hardware in place to build a microwave ring for added redundancy in the future.

The secret to Seguin’s fiber project is the city’s electric department. None of it would have been possible without Seguin Utilities. The city owns the poles and has the manpower and knowledge to run fiber internally. Even with paying lineman overtime to run fiber, this approach has saved Seguin taxpayers an inordinate amount of money.

Besides the initial $50k, another $40k was budgeted in FY19-20 to bring the total amount invested to $90k. To date, Seguin IT has spent $83k on fiber expansion, to include mapping software for data retention and knowledge transfer purposes. Due to the success of the fiber expansion, another $100k has been allocated through American Rescue Plan funding to build a secondary ring in South Seguin. The ARP funding will be utilized to continue Seguin’s fiber expansion journey by expanding the ring and adding further enterprise resiliency.