Wadsworth advances FTTH rollout with Aspen contracts and bandwidth buys

Wadsworth’s Committee of the Whole — Finance on Jan. 20 authorized contracting steps to advance the city’s Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) deployment and CityLink network. Assistant Public Service Director Mike Testa told Council the city will hire Aspen Smart Networks for project-management and network support services — an estimated $18,000 per month for project management (roughly $216,000 total) and up to $85,000 budgeted for operational support, programming and 24/7 monitoring.

Testa explained Aspen was the original designer of the FTTH project and that the services “cover construction management services where they were interfacing with contractors, managing project documentation, handling the design changes, and managing any out-of-scope work for new developments that were not in the original plan.” Council Members agreed to sponsor and suspend readings so the fiber work can proceed. The ordinance authorizing the project-management contract was assigned No. 26-006 and the operational-support authorization was assigned No. 26-007.

The meeting also cleared two bandwidth contracts to provide redundancy for CityLink. Testa described a 40-gigabit circuit from Everstream priced at about $88,000 per year (roughly $7,300 per month) and a Cogent circuit at about $6,800 per month; those ordinances were assigned Nos. 26-008 and 26-009 and were moved forward so the City can secure service without delay. Testa said the City maintains three parallel circuits (including the Ohio IX peering) to improve capacity and resilience for consumers and large content access.

Council’s actions were procedural authorizations and did not include final contract text in the minutes. Next steps include execution of the Aspen agreements and formal contracts with the bandwidth providers and implementation work to bring network cabinets, equipment provisioning, and monitoring systems online.