As anyone who’s ever experienced a botched surgery can attest, some surgeons sure could use a practice run before they cut into their patients.
In Cleveland, Ohio, brain surgeons may have that opportunity thanks to a start-up called Surgical Theater. The company, founded by some of the same people who created a flight simulator system, hopes to provide doctors with the ability to practice their surgeries under simulated conditions with the details of their patients programmed in.
This company, and two other high-tech start-ups, moved to a specific local neighborhood near Case Western Reserve University last year so that they could take advantage of an ultra-high-speed internet network that’s serving as a testbed of sorts, says Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western.
Gonick has been involved in setting up a pilot neighborhood internet service provider that offers one gigabit network connections to 104 homes near the university. Like a lot of other technologists and policymakers, he believes that the build-out of such high-speed networks will enable new forms of economic development and innovation to take place.
Case Western’s leaders agree with him, and they’ve signed up to be part of a broader 29-university-strong initiative that was recently launched to encourage the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure providers to build the networks to enable such development.
The initiative is called “Gig.U,” and it’s an attempt to prove to the telecommunications infrastructure providers that there is enough demand within university communities to justify the investment to build out fiber-to-the home networks.
As TPM recently noted, the U.S. is lagging behind China, Japan and South Korea in fiber-to-the-home deployments.
“The entire effort is focused on aggregating demand,” Gonick told TPM. “So if you’re sitting with a lot of cash on the sidelines, wanting to make a bet, not on a hunch, but based on evidence of demand, here are 29 universities where there is already density of use, and there’s a common experience of using high-speed networks on the campus.”
The team in charge of leading the effort is going to send requests for information out to their respective university communities to assess demand, and then present that information to the network providers.
“One of the ways to think about it is the opposite of what Google did, where they said to the community: ‘Tell us about yourselves, and why we should come to you,'” explained Elise Kohn, Gig U.’s program director. “What we’re saying is: We have the community where we think the market makes sense for providers, and we want providers to work with these communities to figure things out, and make the business case work.”
Kohn is a former policy advisor at the Federal Communications Commission, and adoption director on the National Broadband Plan. She’s working with Blair Levin, who was the plan’s executive director at the FCC, and now a communications and society fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Google and Kansas City are experimenting with the build-out of a gigabit fiber network. They expect the network to be up-and-running in 2012. Google solicited input from cities around the United States before it chose Kansas City as its testbed.
Gig.U’s plan is to issue a formal request for information and ideas from the communities within the next two months, with a response to those ideas scheduled sometime within the Fall, Kohn said.
The Obama administration rolled out its national broadband plan in Spring 2010. It’s a broad plan with many components, but tries to establish a coherent and co-ordinated way to push the United States forward with its broadband infrastructure.
One of the administration’s goals is to make affordable 100 megabit-per-second service available to 100 million U.S. homes by 2020, and one gbps service to anchor institutions such as hospitals and schools in every U.S. community in the same timeframe.
The goals of the broadband advocates while laudable, face big challenges given the financial and political realities of building such networks, notes Chris Mitchell, an analyst whose job it is to track the development of ultra-high-speed internet community networks for a group called the Institute for Self Reliance.
The group advocates the idea that local communities should finance and be in control of their own telecommunications networks.
Mitchell is skeptical about the idea that telecommunications providers will step into the void without some governmental involvement.
“Every time we’ve had a massive investment in networks, and every time we’ve seen it both here and in other countries, government has been involved in pushing it in one way or another, and that’s because these projects are incredibly difficult,” he said.
Nevertheless, Gig.U has lined up dozens of policymakers both currently and formerly in office to endorse its initiative.
Reed Hundt, a Democrat and one of the FCC’s former chairmen, summed up the hopes of the policymaking community best when he said of the initiative last week:
“By aggregating demand to drive new investment in new infrastructure, Gig.U holds the promise of innovation, economic growth and bringing jobs back to America,” he said. “We should all hope the current and potential service providers take advantage of this opportunity to find new ways to make infrastructure investments pay off for all Americans.”
