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Council approves contract for secondary fiber circuit to improve city network redundancy
Summary
City staff won council approval on a consent-item ordinance to add a secondary Spectrum fiber circuit for automatic failover and to reduce load on the existing Everstream connection; contract is 36 months at $700/month.
The council approved, on the consent agenda, an ordinance authorizing the city to add a secondary fiber internet circuit from Spectrum, which staff said will provide automatic failover and share traffic with the city’s current Everstream circuit.
IT staff said the city currently runs many critical functions — emergency dispatch, fire station alerting, jail video monitoring, phones, finance and permitting systems — through a single internet connection and is vulnerable to outages. The Spectrum contract presented to council is a 36-month agreement at $700 per month with no installation cost. Staff estimated an additional yearly cost of about $8,400 and said combining the two circuits could lower the city’s Everstream charges starting in 2026 by offloading some traffic. Staff also said the Spectrum route would diverge physically from the Everstream path, entering from Breckell Road to the police department to reduce single-point-of-failure risk.
Council members asked about power failure and backup power; staff said generators and battery backups protect some systems and emergency services have additional failover measures. The ordinance authorizing the additional fiber circuit was placed on the consent agenda and adopted as part of the council’s consent vote.
The contract term and monthly price were presented in the staff packet; staff said the Spectrum service is the most cost-effective of the options evaluated.
