The city is looking to enhance services to the community while creating a revenue stream for municipal coffers at the same time.City council approved the community fibre optic network plan and authorized staff to proceed with offering value-added technology services to community organizations, local businesses and other local government entities.“It’s an exciting plan that looks at making some offers to businesses and industries that would give us an opportunity to have a revenue stream,” said Mayor Brian Taylor during the regular council meeting in chambers on March 10. The fibre optic plan is an agreement between the City of Grand Forks and School District 51 (Boundary).The fibre network was installed in the city in 2010 at an estimated cost of $1,050,000.In November 2011, the city signed a five-year contract with Telus to provide 10 megabits per second fibre Internet connection for $20,000 per year.A staff report to council on the matter said, “The shared infrastructure in the data centre provides good quality, reliable, redundant network gear to the city and school district and makes it possible to offer this infrastructure to other organizations.“It’s an opportunity to take a great asset that we’ve established and begin to expand it,” Taylor told the Gazette after the meeting the city has always had visions it could hook up more businesses and organizations within municipal boundaries. “We’re in a position now that we can move in that direction,” he said.The key assets in the network for generating revenue are: the data centre; fibre optic network; and server infrastructure.The data centre currently hosts several key services including email servers, spam filter, web servers, backup storage, VoiP phone system, rack space and centralized faxing.