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The City of New Westminster is building a powerful new fibreoptic communications corridor in a bid to attract high-tech businesses to the city and medical technology startups to a new health sciences hub around the expanding Royal Columbian Hospital.

Royal Columbian will double in size over the next decade and during that time much of the surrounding Sapperton neighbourhood will be redeveloped with housing, office space, shops, restaurants and a health sciences cluster known as the IDEA Centre.

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The hospital is New Westminster’s biggest employer, providing 3,500 jobs, growing to 6,000 when the expansion is complete. The city hopes to capitalize on the expansion and attract new businesses by building the fibreoptic BridgeNet network and a district energy system to provide renewable heat and hot water.

“We’ve been working toward the IDEA Centre as part of our economic development plan for a long time,” said city spokesman Blair Fryer. “We have relative affordability, an area serviced by two SkyTrain stations, and now this piece of critical infrastructure.”