Local-government officials, industry thought leaders, technology and service providers and systems integrators met in an interactive three-day program to explore the full range of opportunities and roadblocks surrounding the planning and deployment of metro-area broadband networks in local communities. Philadelphia was the location for the Convention because of the efforts of the city's mayor, John Street, and chief information officer, Dianah Neff, to roll out a 135-square-mile, digital infrastructure to help citizens, businesses, schools and community organizations make effective use of wireless technology. About 40 percent of Philadelphia's population still has no access to broadband and won't anytime soon because its neighborhoods are not attractive to present service operators given current wired-technology infrastructure costs.
Not surprisingly, Philadelphia now sits squarely at the center of a debate in the United States over the right of local governments to plan and own their own broadband communications infrastructure for public safety, city workers, e-government applications, economic development and bridging the digital divide.
In federal hearings and in state legislatures over the past year and a half, telecom-industry representatives have forcefully argued that municipalities wield unfair advantages over private industry and should not be using taxpayer dollars to deploy their own networks. To date, some 15 US states, which under federal law have the right to chart their own telecommunications destinies, have passed legislation limiting or curtailing the rights municipalities to deploy metro-area broadband networks.
Most famously, at the end of November 2004, Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell signed a wide-ranging telephone and broadband bill supported heavily by incumbent service operators and generally prohibiting municipalities from providing Internet access to residents for a fee. In a November 30 press release, the governor stated: "[M]unicipalities must offer the incumbent telephone company the right of first refusal to provide the proposed service."
Because of a strong grassroots effort, however, more than 3,000 people wrote, e-mailed and called the governor's office, which enabled Philadelphia to get an exemption, a one-year delay in the legislation taking effect, and a waiver and exemption from litigation, "guaranteeing that the particular project can proceed," the Governor stated.
At the beginning of June, US Representative Pete Sessions of Dallas introduced federal legislation to outlaw municipal broadband-wireless networks nationally. The legislation would give phone companies veto power over any municipal projects they do not like. Ironically, Rep. Sessions's district is home to many of the communication industry leaders that would be most aided by this legislation.
"State, federal and local stakeholders have begun taking positions on the issues surrounding city-led broadband deployments," said Carlos Kirjner, telecoms practice leader at McKinsey & Co., at the Convention. "You see municipalities saying there is tremendous economic benefit to having broadband in my community, and I want to see if I can do something to improve quality of life and create wealth. But on the other side, the private sector is saying it's taking away their revenue streams. In a few months, they may say they will no longer build in your city or your state. These are fair questions."
It's a critical time for local authorities, as municipalities around the world are beginning to realize that when a huge chunk of their territories is not covered by broadband, their populations are at a disadvantage from an economic and social development standpoint.
"In some countries, you find local authorities are supported by governments, in others it's neutral, and in other countries it is hostile," said Axel Leblois, executive director of CIFAL Atlanta, the U.N.-affiliated organization partnering with the W2i Digital Cities Convention program. "Here in the United States, the federal government is supporting a rural broadband initiative and spending money on it, yet some state legislatures are actually passing laws limiting the initiative of municipalities in that space."
"We have an uncommon national civil war going on between state legislatures and local governments," said Alan Shark, President, Public Technology Institute. "The regional phone companies have been taking aim and largely supporting the state efforts, and local governments need to take a more active role in thwarting roadblocks."
The debate in the United States is being watched around the world as broadband and wireless technologies proliferate, Kirjner said. "The outcome could have public-policy implications for virtually every market."
The stakes can only get higher for local authorities, because broadband has become a key infrastructure, or utility, and mayors are recognizing that it's a service their citizens should not be denied. Consequently, economic development has emerged as a primary driver of deployments, along with the potential of broadband to improve municipal-worker efficiency and increase services to citizens.
Why Digital Cities?
The Digital City is a natural evolution of the age of pervasive computing, said Todd Ramsey, General Manager for Global Government Industry, IBM, in a Convention keynote address. Over the past four decades, the mainframe, PC, and Internet revolutions have led to the era of pervasive computing in which workers are equipped with devices where they work, live and travel and have access to mission-critical data, and can sense and respond to what's going on in their communities.
"This is equivalent of a perfect storm in a technology sense," Ramsey said. "A lot of data is available, it's secure, there's tremendous capacity, and there's standardization—tremendous pressure in almost every country to increase broadband."
The transformation of local communities into Digital Cities is no longer a concept for the future but is being implemented in cities and regions around the world. "There's actually as much or more excitement around this digital concept outside the United States than we're seeing so far in the United States," observed Marc Jedel, Director of Public Sector Market Development, Sales and Marketing Group, Intel.
In the Digital City, people have fast, convenient access to information and to one another from virtually any corner of the community. Government agencies work more efficiently by sharing information and making better use of resources. Emergency workers are better informed and can work more quickly. Citizens are more satisfied with their governments and the quality of life in their community.
The Digital City is wired and wireless broadband, connected through a service-oriented infrastructure supporting interoperable applications. It is modular and scalable so cities can decide what to build and how fast to build it. Convenient access is possible through an array of devices, as the technology itself becomes transparent. Gradually, different agencies and entities—healthcare, education, direct-to-the-home—are bridged together to create a community where people can live, work and play wirelessly.
Different cities begin the journey toward a Digital City in different places, by improving their own efficiency, making local businesses more efficient, generating revenues, or saving lives through improved emergency services. Pick a place to start and expand from there.
Because there are so many different services you might want to put in, you need to figure out where can you start—reducing a "pain point" of neighborhood crime, making a place more attractive for people to come and do business, or generating revenues, or saving lives.
Look at your own needs and begin with what's going to make the biggest impact, and then plan for a modular and scalable communications and application infrastructure. Ask some key questions up front:
- How can different departments and organizations work together?
- How do you transform the way the city operates?
- What are the lessons learned by others both in the United States and abroad?
- What is the requirement that you're trying to meet?
"It's not about the technology, it's about what you do with it," said Mr. Jedel of Intel.
Countries and governments have put lots of money into these networks assuming people will know what to do with them, but there are also countless examples where they became white elephants. Governments must become catalysts to get a galvanized, community effort trying to solve the requirements for the network.
"There's a lot of good technology out there, and it's exciting and fun to watch," Mr. Ramsey of IBM said. "But just putting it out there is not going to solve the problems. Governments really do need to begin integrating, transforming, finding more efficient outcomes than they do today."
The Broadband-Wireless Roadmap
"The explosion in wireless networking began three to four years ago," said Kevin Werbach, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the Wharton School of Business and an expert on the business, policy and social implications of emerging Internet and communications technologies.
In the 1990s, the ISM or 2.4-Ghz band was called the "junk band," and there was little expectation that there was any kind of spectrum available to provide any kind of commercially useful service because of the degree of interference. The Federal Communications Commission made this spectrum available on an unlicensed basis and innovation nonetheless proceeded toward today's Wi-Fi and WiMAX-like technologies.
"This is by no means the end," Werbach said. "There's a notion that spectrum is very limited in capacity, but in fact it's not nearly so limited as we think, which is why this exciting wireless development is happening."
He defined three pillars underpinning "this extraordinary opportunity":
- true leadership by government to trust that if they open a space for innovation, it will happen;
- researchers, academics, and engineers using the capacity in new ways; and
- the private sector, taking that research work, turning it into products and services, coming up with standards, making them interoperable, branding them, and fully unlocking the potential that is out there.
"That kind of virtuous circle is what enabled Wi-Fi to take off so rapidly over the past several years, and what laid the groundwork for cities to deploy networks to provide all these services to their citizens," Mr. Werbach said.
Today, basic Wi-Fi connectivity is widespread, interoperability is fairly understood, but some technologies like WiMAX are newer, and security and quality of service (QoS) issues are less fully resolved. What are the key technological drivers, opportunities and challenges going forward?
Smaller Devices
"No matter where we are, there will always be the next generation of technology, which is getting less expensive, smaller and smaller, and with more capacity" said Marisa Viveros, Director of Strategy in the Global Pervasive Wireless e-Business Group, IBM. "Organizations want to see the benefit from this, but you must build on top of and beneath the network interoperability so you can take advantage of how your data and video can move across it. Make applications independent of the network layer as innovation continues to happen."
The growth in wireless will depend as much on standards, security, devices, and applications as it will on the network infrastructure, Ms. Viveros said. What are the drivers? "It's not only about the convergence of networks—3G and 4G, Wi-Fi, WiMAX—but roaming services and policies allowing coexistence of networks and the convergence of devices that are multimedia, Wi-Fi, 3G and RFID-enabled."
Multi-Networking
Expect a huge wireless data pipe to open up that had once only existed for fixed infrastructure, said Paul Kolodzy, who is affiliated with the Stevens Institute of Technology and a former chairman of the FCC's Spectrum Policy Task Force. Three or four years down the road will invite a multi-tiered wireless world with lower frequencies at the local level and middle and higher frequencies building out an entire infrastructure based on wireless—from the 38-Ghz range to the 70-Ghz allowing a gigabit data link at the higher infrastructure base.
"It's still not fiber, but it has a lot of advantages," Kolodzy said. The disadvantage is that it won't work very well for mobile cases and penetrate through buildings, and implementers will worry about the tradeoff between range—the size of an access point and its capacity—and what kind of mobility needs must be addressed.
WiMAX Horizon
On the immediate horizon, a great deal of attention is being placed on WiMAX, or the IEEE (802.16) standard, which can enable broadband connectivity at long ranges and is especially useful in rural areas and in developing countries where cable and DSL does not exist and people want broadband.
WiMAX core technology is based on a wide-area, non-line-of-sight core technology allowing implementers to build a low-cost wireless access in a large area. Every packet is centrally managed and monitored. There is no pre-required network design, because WiMAX follows an open-network, interface model. It is targeted at licensed and unlicensed spectrums.
WiMAX-certified equipment won't be available until later in 2005, but so-called pre-WiMAX technology has been available for seven to eight years, with half a billion dollars in market sales, said Mohammad Shakouri, Vice President of Marketing, WiMAX Forum.
"A common misperception is that WiMAX is Wi-Fi on steroids," Mr. Werbach noted. "But there are question about where WiMAX is the best fit, and where Wi-Fi is more appropriate."
"Wi-Fi was designed as a LAN extension, to increase the wireless usage of the Internet," Mr. Shakouri said, "but WiMAX is designed for central management of information, with five to ten miles access, serving narrow channels. It is like a wireline infrastructure, designed for outdoor environments and with different QoS such that the delay, amount of data, performance, and multi-task can all be supported. It's a completely different design of the network versus Wi-Fi.
"We wish WiMAX would do everything for everyone," Mr. Shakouri said. "But when I'm inside a building, nothing beats a local area network [i.e., Wi-Fi]. The real revolution we see happening is with mobile WiMAX. It's not just broadband to developing countries, it's going to provide mobility."
Mobile WiMAX will be available in Korea in 2006, and in the United States in 2007.
Conclusions
The Convention confirmed and reinforced the role of government operations and services to citizens as drivers of metro-area broadband networks, both for purposes of cost justifying deployments and for raising the quality of life of citizens across cities, counties and regions, said W2i Executive Director Daniel Aghion. Consensus emerged around:
- the need to act to foster competition for services at the local level,
- a process for building business cases involving partnerships between communities, government and the private sector,
- the need for cities to be heard by state and federal legislative authorities,
- sharing experiences among all the participants, including side conversations among officials about what they do, see, and aspire to.
A Global Program for Local Leaders
The Convention is held annually in each of three regions of the world. Building on the inaugural event in Philadelphia, planning is in final stages for conventions in Asia (May 30-31, 2005 in Shanghai) and Europe (November 2005 in Bilbao) as part of W2i's cooperation with its international-development partners and local-government and private-sector organizations. For more information about the Convention, visit the Web site: www.w2idigitalcitiesconvention.org.
The Convention is also a part of the preparatory process of the World Summit of Local Authorities and Cities in Bilbao, Spain, later this year. The findings from the Convention will be integrated into the Declaration and the Action Plan for 2005 and 2015 to be presented to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan in Bilbao for his approval and attachment to the Tunis Declaration for the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November.
The Tunis Declaration is structured in three parts: states, civil society, and local authorities. "For the first time in history, mayors will be represented in a UN summit with a single message in the Declaration and Action," said Josu Ocariz, director CIFAL Bilbao and host of the Second World Summit of Local Authorities and Cities, November 9–11, 2005 in Bilbao. "Philadelphia is one of the events that will help in achieving a consensus and the loud voice that local authorities will need to be heard in Tunis."
Autor: Peter Orne
Quelle: The WorldPaper, 24.06.2005
