Citizens in Chattanooga, Tennessee, have access to
one-gigabit-per-second Internet—that's 100 times the U.S. national
average, and fast enough to download a two-hour movie in about five
seconds. The only question is: what to do with it?
Wired up: These fiber-optic cables provide one-gigabit-per-second data to 150,000 homes and businesses in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The city is hoping a contest
with $300,000 in prize money will help answer that question. Entrants
are invited to come up with clever ways of making use of the city's
blisteringly fast Internet, which was installed in late 2010 with a $111
million U.S. Department of Energy grant, as part of federal stimulus
efforts that also built out the city utility's long-planned smart grid.
Some early entries include health-care applications, such as
transferring larger files like CT scans in real-time so that specialists
can serve a larger area. Ideas contributed by students include a
platform for high-definition video debates, and international
collaborations with students in Sri Lanka, London, Jamaica, and
elsewhere.
But even if some great ideas come out of the contest, the fact
remains that most people in the U.S. still have access to only
relatively slow Internet connections. Late last year, the United States
ranked 25th in the world for average available Internet speed. By the
end of this year, South Korea, a world leader in Internet speed, will
provide one-gigabit service nationwide for about $27 a month.
Furthermore, where superfast Internet is available in the U.S., it is
typically prohibitively expensive. The Chattanooga service has been
available for more than a year to 150,000 residential and commercial
customers for $350 per month, but it has so far found only eight
residential subscribers and 18 commercial ones.
Even so, in Tennessee they are optimistic that the contest will bring
rewards. "Eventually, these fatter pipes will get filled with
bandwidth-eating applications," says Jack Studer, partner at the Lamp Post Group, a VC firm in Chattanooga that, along with companies including Alcatel, Cisco, and IBM, is sponsoring the contests.
"What we are trying to do is inject some capital into innovation,
with the goal of driving demand for higher-bandwidth networks and
jump-start adoption across the country and world," Studer says. "We plan
to do this for multiple years—in the second and third year, we may see a
revolutionary jump to things we may not be thinking about now."
Get connected: A utility box in Chattanooga.
The $300,000 prize money will be split among students and
entrepreneurs. Ten startups will get $15,000 this summer to develop and
test their gigabit business ideas. A local judging panel will give a
$100,000 prize for the winner. A separate student contest will carry a
$50,000 prize. The deadline for entries is March 1.
Chattanooga is the only place in the United States providing such
high-speed service. But others are on the way: Google is going into the
Internet service provider business, stringing fiber
on telephone poles in Kansas City, Missouri, and adjacent Kansas City,
Kansas. The first of its customers should get a connection by the middle
of 2012, a spokesman says.
Video is the fastest-growing bandwidth-hogging app, and it could be
an important driving force for faster Internet speeds. Google is, in
fact, hoping to provide a TV service as part of its broadband efforts.
Earlier this month, the company filed applications with the Missouri
Public Service Commission and the Kansas Corporation Commission that
would allow it to supply a TV service.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission
in 2010 defined "basic broadband" as at least four-megabits-per-second
download speed and one-megabit-per-second upload speed. The efforts in
Chattanooga and Kansas City are a step toward carrying out the FCC's
ambitious National Broadband Plan,
which aims to not only provide this minimal level of service to every
community, but also to achieve the more ambitious goal of providing a
majority of households with 100-megabit-per-second service by 2020.
The Chattanooga network was built by the city-owned Electric Power Board.
The utility uses the fiber partly for a smart electric grid that does
things like detect overloads and reroute power on the fly to avoid
costly brownouts.
History suggests that faster broadband spurs innovation and new
business, says Rob Vietzke, vice president of network services at Internet2,
a networking consortium that provides blazing fast Internet to research
labs and government agencies. For example, in 2005, YouTube emerged
with an application enabled by the growing availability of broadband in
U.S. homes and businesses. "Projects like Chattanooga and Kansas City
reopen the opportunity for innovation," Vietzke says. "You can't predict
exactly what will happen, but it lays the groundwork for people to
think differently about how they do their work."
One possible application of one-gigabit service involves streaming
super-high definition video at four or more times the resolution of
current HD technology, Vietzke says. Such high-quality streams could be
useful for telemedicine and realistic remote meetings, but would require
at least 100-megabit service, he adds.
Internet2, for its part, is working on delivering 100-gigabit service,
initially to research centers in Indiana and Ohio—useful for such
applications as crunching data from genomics research and from particle
physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. (Some scientific
instruments dish out even more data—deep-space telescopes, for example,
can generate one terabit a second.)
All of this is way beyond the perceived needs of the average
Chattanoogan. "Anything that makes my Netflix streaming move faster is
okay with me," quips Tom Balázs, an assistant professor of English at
the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.
By David Talbot
From Technology Review
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