Public Power - September/October 2007 - (Page 35)

tomers to obtain DSL speeds of over 40 megabits and Vienna, Austria, is considering plans to roll out a one gigabit network to every home and business. Average U.S. households are in the slow lane, with average broadband speeds of less than two megabits per second. The Federal Communications Commission “continues to define broadband as data services with speeds over 200 kilobits in one direction,” Atkinson said. “These are speeds that are 100 times slower than average speeds in Japan. It’s time for the FCC to develop a new definition of advanced broadband services defined as asymmetric speeds of at least five megabits … High-speed broadband applications (such as on-demand Web TV, telemedicine, Web-based video telephony, etc.) are slow to emerge [in the United States] because so few Americans have high-speed broadband.” FCC Commissioner Michael Copps agrees on the importance of speed. “It’s also about what type of value consumers will get with their broadband. If you were going to download a movie at 200 kilobits, it would take you 17 hours. If you downloaded at 50 megabits, which is what Japan has, it would take you four minutes. That’s a value difference.” The gap between the United States and the world’s broadband leaders has extensive implications for America’s status as a world economic leader. The Brookings Institution, an independent research and public policy organization, estimated that America’s broadband decline could lead to a potential loss of $1 trillion in economic productivity over the next decade, as well as more than 1.2 million jobs that could be created by better broadband. “Rankings matter because leading-edge nations are likely to be more economically competitive,” Atkinson said. “One reason is that nations with more and faster broadband are likely to have consumers that are more sophisticated in their IT and Internet activities. The speed and ubiquity of broadband in South Korea, for example, has made it a test bed for next-generation Internet-based services and products.” Jim Baller, a founder of the Community Broadband Coalition and an attorney spewww.APPAnet.org cializing in municipal broadband law, said most of the major incumbent phone and cable companies in the United States claim that they face a big “chicken-and-egg” problem. “They say that they can’t afford to build expensive high-capacity networks until consumers demand high-bandwidth services that need such networks, but consumers won’t demand high-bandwidth services until the networks are in place to run them.” As a nation, the United States cannot allow that kind of thinking to lock us into our inadequate existing networks, he said. “With the public and private sectors in other leading nations working together to develop high-capacity networks as rapidly as possible, the United States must find ways do the same or risk losing its position of leadership in the emerging global economy. That’s why it’s so important to act quickly to develop a national broadband Taipei Named 2006 Intelligent Community The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) named Taipei the 2006 Intelligent Community of the Year. The city of 2.6 million people is one of the top three cities in the world for broadband deployment with PCs in 88 percent of homes and 77 percent connected with ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) service. Taipei’s development as a broadband leader began with the election of Mayor Ying-jeou Ma in 1998. Ma challenged the city’s leadership to develop Taipei into a CyberCity. The first phase of the CyberCity plan was to build broadband infrastructure and then use the Internet to improve public services. The city invested US$75 million per year from 1999 to 2002 to provide a PC to each government agency employee, deployed a citywide electronic system that saved US$7.5 million per year, and created hundreds of online applications for city services, including the transportation and rapid transit systems. In the schools, the city placed at least one PC with broadband connectivity in every classroom, created computer labs in 250 schools, and provided training for all teachers in PC and Internet skills. ICF recognized these efforts by naming Taipei one of its Top Seven Intelligent Communities in 2003. In the second phase, the city worked to integrate online services into residents’ lives. By 2005, 84 percent of the government’s documents were exchanged online, its Internet portal offered 400 city services to residents, and 500 small and midsized companies created Web sites on the free city business portal. A second part of this phase was to train students quickly to become Internetsavvy workers. So, every four years, the city invests $93 million in IT education at schools, universities and business incubators. Microsoft and Cisco have invested heavily in IT education in Taipei’s schools and businesses. The city also deployed a municipal wireless network to mass transit stations and all schools, in which each class has its own Web site to facilitate teacher-student communications. The wireless network will be extended to 90 percent of the city. The city places top priority on using broadband to ensure digital equality. Nonprofit organizations have used the city’s help to establish 13 community universities offering free IT training to more than 220,000 residents. Eight hundred Internet kiosks throughout the city give all residents access to online services. A healthcare initiative has networked the data systems of 300 hospitals and clinics and provided safety monitoring for the elderly and disabled through wristbands. On New Year’s Eve 2004, the city opened Taipei 101, the world’s tallest skyscraper and one of the most technologically advanced buildings in the world. s SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 35 http://www.APPAnet.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - September/October 2007

Contents Washington Focus 10 Questions Public Power (Every) Week Training Tomorrow’s Work Force What’s in Your Wallet? U.S. Lags in Broadband Deployment Now What? For Engineers Safety Community Broadband For Governing Boards Human Resources Hometown Connections Customer Service DEED Index to Advertisers Advertisers by Category Parting Shot

Public Power - September/October 2007

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