IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

"The Rs.20,000 crore project for the creation of a 'National Optical Fibre Network’ (NOFN) for providing internet and other telecommunications connectivity to villages has been launched recently. It would be completed by the next two years,” BSNL CMD R.K. Upadhyaya told reporters.

The ADNET MoU signed at a ceremony held on the Musanada premises in Abu Dhabi marked the soft launch of ADNET and the completion of the implementation of the network infrastructure and the establishment of a 24x7 Network Operations Centre (NOC).

The UK government is moving 150 of its departments to a more secure IT network and intranet in a bid to improve communication in the public sector.

Service provider Energis, which completed the first phase of the £60m contract last week, said the Government Secure Intranet (GSi) will allow civil servants to communicate over departments through peer-to peer technology and virtual private networks.

Chattanooga is hurtling forward with a 25-gig network for everyone and a major new business push behind so-called quantum networking

Before it became the country's first "gig city," Chattanooga, Tenn., moved at a languid pace -- if it moved at all.

"In the late '80s and early '90s, Chattanooga was a dying city of industrial companies leaving," said Mayor Tim Kelly, a Chattanooga native who was reluctant to come home after attending Columbia University in New York. "But I felt a sense of obligation [a car business in town owned by his family]. At the time, Chattanooga did not have a buzz."

The California Earthquake Clearinghouse, a voluntary group designed to share knowledge among the scientific and engineering communities after an earthquake, is testing a new middleware that would create a virtual network to make knowledge sharing and response more effective.

The middleware, Unified Incident Command and Decision Support (UICDS), was developed through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate. It allows an organization at no cost to create a specialized application of how its members want to view and use data at the front end, while simultaneously translating that data into common national and international standard formats for any agency, including emergency responders, to use during an incident.

Network is expected to aid the development of smart city applications

The South Bay Cities Council of Governments (SBCCOG) in Los Angeles has established a low-cost fibre-optic network to improve regional transportation.

It says the South Bay Fiber Network (SBFN) enables local municipalities and other public agencies to access a high-speed, 1 gigabyte (GB) network for $1,000 per month.

FirstNet crawled toward its goal of developing a nationwide public safety broadband network at the start of the year, spending its first few months naming board members and conducting business operations. But by spring, the entity ramped up with a flurry of activity, setting the stage for what looks like a whirlwind 2014.

The National Science Foundation, US Ignite and other partners announced the launch of a wireless communications testbed in rural central Iowa to explore expanding broadband access to rural America and other innovations.

A new broadband testbed in Iowa will explore not only how to improve access and reduce costs for Internet connectivity in rural America, but will also help to develop innovations for digitally connected farms.

Senet’s integration partnership with the Helium Network provides access to more than 27,500 Helium-compatible hotspots in the New York City area, densifying and extending LoRaWan network coverage.

New York City has expanded the build-out of a public LoRaWan network across all five boroughs of the city.

The RHIOs (Brooklyn Health Information Exchange, e-Health Network of Long Island, and THINC) and HIE vendors (HealthUnity, IBM, and InterSystems) have each formally joined forces with NYeC to facilitate HIE across New York's downstate region—comprised of New York City's five boroughs, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley and with a combined population of 13 million.

Vidant Medical Center is part of Vidant Health, a 10-hospital non-profit collective serving Eastern North Carolina. Vidant Medical Center is using a combination of its fiber and MCNC-provided fiber for a fully-dedicated 1 gigabit per second connection to the NCTN. The NCTN, is a network dedicated to health care providers and public health facilities.

Sugar Land plans to install hundreds of miles of infrastructure that will enable all residents and businesses to access fast, affordable and reliable internet.

During a recent meeting, the City of Sugar Land approved SiFi Networks’ 30-year plan to establish fiber optic infrastructure across the city.

Over one million feet of network lines have been installed throughout the city.

A citywide fiber network created to connect Kenosha residents with lightning-fast, reliable, affordable internet will soon reach its first Kenosha homes, according to SiFi Networks officials.

SiFi Networks is the driving force behind Kenosha FiberCity. It privately funds and operates citywide, open-access Smart City-enabled fiber networks across the United States.

The telecommunications market is undergoing significant changes, which include industry consolidation and a shifting contracting environment. At the same time, the demand for services is increasing.

In a recent market analysis report, Input predicted steady growth for the federal and the state and local markets. In the state and local market, the firm's analysts predict 70 percent spending growth in the next five years — from $9.6 billion in 2005 to $16.4 billion in 2010. That represents compound annual growth rate of 11.4 percent.

The Homeland Security Information Network-Secret (HSIN-Secret) is an “immediate, inexpensive and temporary approach to reach state and local homeland security and law enforcement sites that can receive secret-level information,” Matthew Broderick, director of the Homeland Security Operations Center, said in testimony today to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing and Terrorism Risk Assessment.

I find myself having recurrent conversations with city managers and innovators. We discuss the juxtaposition of a city wanting to become smarter—and provide better outcomes for its community—and the challenges of doing so with a limited budget and an unclear path on how to progress. Cities have massive data opportunities. So, to make their cities smart, leaders need to be able to gather data in a usable form to gain insights and make decisions.