The complete CSFN project will consist of 60 miles of fiber optic backbone and lateral infrastructure linking south suburban municipalities, public safety sites, community colleges, economic development fiber optic access sites, and two major Cook County anchor locations – Markham Courthouse and Oak Forest Hospital. The fiber optic infrastructure will be used to provide backbone connectivity to the SSMMA communities bordering I-57 and other key sites in the corridor, establishing access to high capacity Internet services. This will include access to the Illinois Century Network (ICN), which is used for education and public institutions, and dark fiber resources for both public and private entities, which is used for point to point or multi-point network and data applications.
Urbancom.net will operate the network and provide commercial services to network customers. The network will originate at Urbancom’s Oak Forest IL headquarters, which will provide multi-homed backbone connectivity to major peering points. Initial peering points will connect directly to the 350 E. Cermak Road, Chicago IL datacenter which is Chicago’s major peering point and the Latisys Data Center location in Oak Brook IL. Additionally, Urbancom will have peering connections to the iFiber and NIU Net, DeKalb DATA Network, Illinois Rural Health Network, Aurora OnLight and the Illinois Century Network (ICN).
As part of the project Urbancom is upgrading their Data Center in Oak Forest to a Tier III Level, which will initially accommodate more than 50 high density server cabinets for both governmental and commercial co-location of servers and cloud computing. Bandwidth available at the data center will initially consist of multi-homed 50 Gbps connections to Chicago and Oak Brook.
Urbancom will provide a full range commercial internet services including hosted and cloud based solutions including VoIP and video conferencing as well as disaster recovery and business reconstitution services.
Urbancom CEO Ed Urban commented at the recent Southland Economic Development conference that he is pleased with the high level of support provided by Governor Quinn for the project which he believes will be an economic boom to Chicago’s south suburbs.
The network is expected to be fully operational in Q3 2014.