PHOTO COURTESY OF HERMISTON HIGH SCHOOL
[quote style=”2″]Company Working With Hermiston School District[/quote]
Hermiston-area students involved with the Columbia Basin Student Homebuilder Program (CBSHP) will have the opportunity to build a fiber Internet connection to the houses they construct.
High school students are in the classroom this spring working on ideas for the program’s first house, the foundation of which should be finished by the start of the next school year, according to Hermiston School District Deputy Superintendent Wade Smith.
Several classes at Hermiston High School will be involved in the project, including the business and marketing courses, the graphics design classes, the family & consumer sciences classes, and a new course on sustainable landscaping.
Within the next few weeks, Eastern Oregon Telecom will send a technician to visit classes and explain to students the technological considerations they need to take into account as they design the homes.
“Hopefully we’ll get some kids out splicing some fiber here in the coming months — or year — as we go ahead and incorporate those technologies into the home design, which we’re just starting right now,” said Smith.
Work on the infrastructure of phase one of the three-phase subdivision will begin as early as June. Phase one will include 11 houses in a cul-de-sac situated off of S.W. Ninth Street, next to Armand Larive Middle School.
The school district’s goal is to build one house per year, with the proceeds of each house funding the construction of the next. Each house will be about 2,000 square feet.
“These homes will be extremely high quality because we’ll have the time, energy, expertise and mentorship to put into it,” Smith said.
He used Forest Grove, which has had a similar student construction program in place since 1974, as an example of the anticipated success of this program.
“In most cases, their homes sell the same day they’re advertised,” he said. “There’s almost a waiting list in Forest Grove to be very unique, and that’s why I think this idea of bringing fiber high speed Internet is just one of those things that make it such a cool, saleable opportunity for kids.”
Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) broadband connection immediately adds about $5,000 to the value of a house.
Joe Franell, CEO and general manager of Eastern Oregon Telecom (EOT), says that his company’s goal for this project is “to help the school district and the kids to build a quality home that’s marketable and sellable and, in the process, learn about a different piece of home construction that is often neglected.”
FTTH will provide the owners of these homes with gigabit Internet speeds — almost 1,000 times faster than most DSL and cable Internet connections.
“Once the fiber is to the home,” Franell said, “it’s fully scalable. So it’s not unreasonable to say that, in the future, these homes could then be upgraded to 10 gig, which is an insane amount of bandwidth – 10,000 megabits per second of data.”
Another of EOT’s goals is to help CBSHP participants develop technological understanding and skills. Students will have the opportunity to learn to splice fiber with a fusion splicer and pull it into the house, design the house for “smart home” capabilities, and install electronics.
“Our third goal is to inspire the next generation of technicians to go into the marketplace so that I have people to hire as I continue to grow,” Franell said. “We struggle to find people who are in this industry because, as a nation, we’ve neglected the trade or the craft segment of education; everything’s been focused on a four-year post-high school path.”
Franell hopes that the CBHS program will help many students discover their passions for work in technical fields and encourage them to go to trade schools and then live and work in the Hermiston area, “and bring that quality talent back here instead of losing it to some other industry.”
Experts have predicted that only FTTH will have the bandwidth capacity to meet consumer demands over the next decade.
“Scaling these homes out of the box, so to speak, to be able to meet that demand is going to be really, really important for the marketability and then also for the education of the kids who are doing it,” Franell said.
EOT technicians will be onsite during construction, teaching students about every aspect of technology in the houses: cat5 wiring, putting in switches, building and splicing fiber — even the hardline they’ll build down Ninth Street.
“They will be showpieces,” Smith said about the new homes. “These will be some of the first levels of homes in Hermiston to have (FTTH) capability.”
“This (one gig Internet speed) is the same level of service that Google has brought to Kansas City and Austin, Texas, and have just announced they’re going to bring to Portland,” Franell said. “EOT and the school district will be bringing that to this project. Who needs Google?”
For more information, visit the Columbia Basin Student Homebuilder Program website.
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