Cities need broadband help, Chicago CTO says

Speaking at SuperCOMM on Friday, Chicago CIO Hardik Bhatt said U.S. cities need the aid and cooperation of telecom service providers if they are going to compete globally with Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Bangalore and others. He cited one city effort to improve technical training and education by creating a high school devoted to IT and telecom skills, only to discover that the most bandwidth available to the new school was two T-1s. "We wanted our students to be able to have interaction with students in other countries," Bhatt said. "Are we going to be able to do that with a 3 Megabit connection? I don't think so. We need every high school, every elementary school in the city to have 100 Megabit per second connections." Bhatt called on telecom service providers to work with cities in public-private partnerships that could benefit both. For example, he said, providing high-speed fiber optic connections to community hubs would enable the city to make the broadband Internet available to the 39% of city residents who don't have broadband, and teach them the advantages of high-speed Internet access.