Big-City Broadband and the New Public Technology

Computerworld - Recently, municipal broadband has made big headlines. Large cities like London, Toronto, San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York have announced plans to offer affordable, high-speed Internet access to all residents through a variety of public or semipublic partnerships. Universal access for the Internet is hot, with countries as diverse as Italy and Rwanda jumping on the broadband bandwagon. Here at home, the Bush administration has called for affordable high-speed Internet to be available in every corner of the U.S. by 2007.

While countries, municipalities and rural communities alike are eager to make the wireless leap, not as much thought seems to be going into how they will best package and who will use a public high-speed on-ramp once deployed. We all agree that having higher-quality and more affordable Internet access is a good thing, but when the Internet becomes a publicly accessed utility, it needs to be planned for just like any other public good.

You don't plan roadways and lay out power grids without first determining how many people will be using available services, at what quantity, and how they will be utilized.

Having a carefully crafted strategy for wireless and Internet access is perhaps even more important than for more traditional utilities. The use of roadways and electricity has changed little over the past 50 years, but mobile technology and Internet tools are changing overnight. And cutting-edge applications already demand more bandwidth than standard broadband often provides.

Beyond being providers and regulators of utilities, local governments now have an increasing responsibility to be proactive in enhancing city and social services via technology. Online libraries, wireless emergency and crime-reporting networks, and mobile homeless-care coordination are but a few examples of just-over-the-horizon opportunities requiring the attention of city hall.

San Francisco, with its new TechConnect program, offers a good example of leadership in public technology. As part of a larger effort to ensure affordable broadband access to city residents, TechConnect promises to offer "affordable hardware, community-sensitive training and support, and relevant content to all San Franciscans, especially low-income and disadvantaged residents."

Support may also be available on a statewide level in California. The recent SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI mergers led to the creation of the California Emerging Technology Fund, a $60 million independent fund dedicated to promoting access to and use of broadband and advanced telecommunications services throughout California over the next five years.

These are hopeful signs. But more targeted strategies are also needed, including the following:

• Government-led public technology needs assessment and innovation: Right now, municipal IT departments have their hands full with supporting and protecting their own information and telecommunications infrastructures. As we move toward broadband as a government-sponsored utility, and as government services become more technology-dependent, it behooves the government itself to become better connected with technology needs and possibilities on the ground. Seattle, for example, has its own community technology manager and a Citizen's Telecommunications and Technology Advisory Board.
• More public/private partnerships: Instead of just procuring technology products and services from private vendors and adapting them for local use via consultants, cities should consider a more active role in visioning future needs and partner with companies and social entrepreneurs to develop homegrown solutions to local challenges. While developing public technology research and development departments is out of the question for most cities, a public/private partnership to do the same is not.
• Tapping into local technology reserves: Rather than keeping technology activists and innovators at arm's length, cities should actively welcome the participation of one of California's greatest natural resources in the development of new public tools and services. Community wireless advocates have been actively lobbying for municipal wireless projects for many years but were largely shunned by the powers that be until wireless became front-page news. Today, numerous community-based, nonprofit and open-source projects with potential for wider public adoption are ripe for the picking, but technology-focused liaisons in government are in short supply.
• Addressing the have-nots: In fulfilling their mandates to offer universal broadband and other technology services to their residents, it is important for cities to remember George Orwell's famous Animal Farm quote that "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others." As lower-cost and free broadband increases equality of access, skill levels, education and equipment will continue to vary widely, and technology adoption will remain strikingly unequal unless something is done about it.

Making sure that the have-nots can benefit from more affordable technology offerings in the same way as tech elites should be a key objective of public technology projects. It is for this very reason that the U.K. government is exploring the establishment of a national-level digital-inclusion department with goals similar to that of San Francisco's TechConnect project.

• Coordination and information sharing among local efforts: The good news is that local entities are taking the initiative to provide high-speed Internet to their residents and aren't waiting to see if the state or federal governments to implement their own larger programs. The bad news is that with all of this local activity, there are bound to be miscommunications among neighboring communities, competition and lack of information sharing that could avoid reinvention-of-the-wheel syndrome. If and when state and federal governments do move to enter the public technology arena, centralized coordination of efforts will become more important still.