The beginning of this week was something of a broadband fest for the US president Barack Obama, pledging another $100 million for spectrum sharing research, and promising that Federal departments will join a single approach to working with broadband suppliers, which will take in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Interior, Transportation, Veterans Affairs and the Postal Service. He says this will make broadband construction along Federal roadways and properties up to 90% cheaper.
The President also launched a new program that promises to bring 100 Mbps broadband to virtually every US student, and will also coerce government agencies to increase their collaboration and data-sharing with the private sector.
Obama launched these programs with a glowing a four year retrospective on what he has already done in broadband launching his ‘Four Years of Broadband Growth,’ which claimed that since 2009, the percentage of American homes reached by high-speed broadband has quadrupled from less than 20% to more than 80%, while average broadband speeds have doubled. Home connections have jumped from 4.4% to 67%, as the industry has brought investment up by 40% from $21 billion to $30 billion last year and forecast to be $35 billion in 2013.
The Memorandum directs Federal agencies to increase their collaboration with the private sector and calls upon them to increase public-private R&D activities. It empowers a White House-based Spectrum Policy Team to oversee implementation of the Memorandum and make further recommendations.
By September, the National Science Foundation will award $23 million in spectrum-sharing R&D grants and DARPA will announce the first 2 of an expected $60 million in spectrum-sharing contracts. In 2014 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will devote another $17.5 million towards spectrum and advanced communications research as well as accelerate public-private collaboration at Federal laboratories.
Obama said that the US wireless broadband industry contributes more than $150 billion in GDP annually, is ahead in LTE implementation, and pointed out the obvious, that US companies dominate the market for smartphone operating systems and produce about a quarter of all smartphones.
The White House is also announcing that nearly 100 partners’including more than 25 cities as well as corporate and non-profit entities’will join with more than 60 national research universities to form a new public-private partnership called ‘US Ignite.’ The US Ignite Partnership will create a new wave of services that take advantage of state-of-the-art, programmable broadband networks running up to 100 times faster than today’s Internet.
By bringing software developers and engineers from government and industry together with representatives from communities, schools, hospitals, and other institutions that will benefit from faster and more agile broadband options, the partnership aims to speed up and increase the development of applications for advanced manufacturing, medical monitoring, emergency preparedness, and a host of other services.
The new US Ignite Partnership (www.us-ignite.org) will create a national network of communities and campuses with ultra-fast, programmable broadband services, operating at speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second and this will become a test-bed for designing next-generation applications in areas such as education, healthcare, energy, and advanced manufacturing.
Cisco, Juniper, NEC, and Hewlett-Packard are offering help, to name but a few, along with carriers, like Verizon and Comcast, which are announcing new pilot cities on their network that will participate in US Ignite.
The National Science Foundation will put $20 million into building a prototype. This is in addition to the $40 million that NSF has invested over the past four years in its GENI project, which connects a dozen universities with next-generation broadband connections.