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as a short (1,500 feet) amount of fiber running from the Arden Hills City Hall to the adjacent maintenance facility. County staff first began talking with NSCC staff about the possibility of using the NSCC I-Net in late s�mmerlearly fall 2003. More formal correspondence and discussions began in May 2004 as the County progressed on its plans to build a new Public Works maintenance facility north of Highway 96 next to the Arden Hills City Hall. (The new building replaces the Public Works building in Shoreview.) One of the reasons that a fiber connection was so important was that the staff assigned to the new building would need to access and transfer �1� files, or maps converted to data files. These files are extremely large, and they need both capacity and speed to ensure that they download in seconds rather than in hours. Since neither the City of St. Paul nor NSCC had an abundance of fiber available, the County planned to use a technology called "coarse wave division multiplexing." For those without a technical background, this means that, instead of using the full light spectrum to transmit data, the laser breaks the spectrum into its component colors, each of which can be used as a data stream. The result is the ability to send more data in the same amount of fiber. This was critical to the project because, on part ofthe St. Paul link, the city and the State of Minnesota were already sharing two strands of fiber. Although NSCC had two strands of fiber available, the commission was reluctant to give up all of that capacity to one user. Multiplexing is a cost-effect method of getting more capacity out of the same amount of fiber. The path for the connection travels on county fiber from the Ramsey County Government Center West building on Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul to the St. Paul City Hall, where it is patched onto the city's I-Net. From there it goes to the state's Centennial Office Building and then on to the Comcast Sims location before connecting to the Comcast headend on �airview Avenue in Roseville, where it is patched over to the NSCC I- Net. Then it travels to the Comcast hub in Shoreview and on to the Arden Hills City Hall. At that point it hops onto fiber owned by the City of Arden Hills for the balance of the trip to the Public Works building. In all, the fiber path is over 38 miles long. The project required Ramsey County officials to enter into agreements with the Cities of St. Paul and Arden Hills, as well as with NSCC. To make the process easier for all involved, St. Paul's Office of Cable and NSCC staff decided to work together on a contract document that was nearly identical for both. The collaboration expedited the contracting process and will make contract administration easier for Ramsey County. The County's connection has been up and running now for nearly two months, and, so far, no one has encountered any problems with the fiber, and the Public Works employees using the connection are thrilled with the increased data capacity and speed.