People who live in big metropolises, like New York City, London or Hong Kong, often say that they can always find someone within a few miles who has a special skill they need to complete some project or build a business. I’ve pointed out that the close proximity of millions of people with so many different skills is part of what has made cities successful economic engines during the industrial era.

You have never seen the work of Ms. Hadam Sung and her sexy dance cover group from Korea, Bambino. She is a “nugu” to you (I’ll explain that one later). On the Internet, however, she is a record-breaking superstar whose talents are cherished throughout Asia. Thanks to broadband, they are exported worldwide. Broadband and innovation, the golden combo, have made it happen for her. Not to mention her hard work and her talent.

--- Experts warn of threat to London’s future competitiveness – and call on next Mayor of London to take action ---

An independent group of telecommunications professionals with more than 500 years’ combined experience today warn that London’s broadband infrastructure is so poor it threatens the capital’s ability to compete with other global cities in the future.

This infographic was created for ICF by StudioLocale (www.studiolocale.com) using data from the Intelligent Community in Numbers report. For more information, click here.

Broadband is defined in different ways in different places. All agree that is an "always on" service, but minimum expectations for speed range from 2 megabits per second up to 10, 20 or 50 times that.

Whatever the speed, the power of broadband is simple enough to express. It connects your computer, laptop or mobile device to billions of devices and users around the world, creating a digital overlay to our physical world that is revolutionizing how we work, play, live, educate and entertain ourselves, govern our citizens and relate to the world. In the "broadband economy" created by this technology...

• The world's largest taxi company, Uber, owns no vehicles.
• The world's most popular media company, Facebook, creates no content.
• The world's largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, owns no real estate.
• The world's most valuable retailer, Alibaba, has no inventory.

Why Communities Get Involved

Infrastructure is the foundation of economic competitiveness. Broadband may be one of the fastest growing technologies in history, but its availability, speed and reliability consistently lag behind user demand, particularly in low-density and low-income markets that do not offer the private sector attractive investment opportunities. That gives local government a strong incentive to involve itself in promoting access to high-quality broadband. The most successful have all begun with the same first step: establishing a clear vision and communicating why broadband access matters. If constituents believe that broadband is just about downloading music or playing online games, they will not provide political support when it is needed. But if they see broadband as a path to prosperity and greater citizen participation, it will be quite a different story.

Once communities know what they want to do and why, they take different paths to get there. The Intelligent Community Forum has identified five approaches taken by the communities we have studied.

1. Development Policy. Remaining safely within the bounds of tradition, governments direct the usual tools of development policy at broadband deployment. They set broadband-friendly building codes. They conduct inventories of existing broadband networks and access points. They offer tax credits and craft rights-of-way policies to support network development.
2. Networks for Government. Local and regional governments are big users of communications, and they are generally as free as any business to build private networks for their own use. To reduce costs and gain new capabilities, they construct a fiber or coaxial network linking all government offices, schools, libraries hospitals and other public facilities. By making these investments in networks and services, governments become a vital anchor tenant for broadband and stimulate demand for broadband services.
3. Public-Private Partnerships. In other cases, government sets its sights on building a public-access network from the start but chooses not to build, own or operate it. Public-private partnerships take many forms, limited only by the imagination and legal framework in which the municipality operates. Some communities issue municipal bonds to fund construction of a network, which they lease to private carriers, with the lease payments covering the debt service. Others create nonprofit organizations to develop networks in collaboration with private carriers or provide seed investment to jumpstart construction of networks that the private sector is unable to cost-justify on its own.
4. Dark Fiber and Open Access Networks. Yet another variation on deployment strategy leverages the municipality's control of its roads and rights of way to encourage the private sector to invest. In these communities, government stops issuing permits to carriers to lay cable or fiber and instead builds its own system of conduits and lays "dark fiber" throughout the network. It then leases access to the fiber to carriers. By digging up the streets once and then closing them to further construction, local governments protect their citizens from the disruption of repeated road work. The municipalities price the leases to cover their construction and maintenance costs as well as providing a positive return on investment. In some cases, the municipalities go a step further by creating an "open network" management platform that permits carriers to provision services almost instantly, which encourages competition and innovation.
5. Direct Competition. The most aggressive posture a community can take is to invest public funds in setting up a broadband carrier, building a network and delivering service to outside customers. Local government typically takes this path after repeated attempts to interest incumbent carriers in upgrading networks have failed because the carriers could not make a business case for investment. Since municipalities need to earn a return sufficient only to pay capital and operating costs, they can frequently make such a case themselves – particularly if they already own and operate water, gas or electric utilities, as many small rural communities do.

Mention municipal broadband, and most people think you are talking about direct competition with the private sector. But direct competition is just one of many strategies and by no means the most common. Intelligent Communities everywhere want the same thing: to get their citizens the broadband utility they need at a price they can afford.

Today, the 50 most prosperous cities in America produce 34% more economic output per person than the national average. Their populations are growing at 3 times the national rate. That’s because they are magnets for ambitious and talented workers and the companies that need their services to power growth.

Last year, the ICF Institute at the Mississippi State University Extension Service issued a competitive call for research papers focusing on the impact of broadband on small rural communities. Three papers were recently chosen for publication on the Institute’s Web site.

Six US Senators, mostly from small rural states, wrote recently to the FCC about the inconsistencies they found between its recent report on broadband progress and its Open Internet order that was issued last March.

The multi-billion-dollar circus that is the American Presidential election rolls ever on. We stand amazed that a billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star, spewing a sneering mix of lies and vitriol, dominates the Republican side of the contest. He is less a Presidential candidate than a walking Twitter account, with a gift for finding words and attitudes that speak powerfully to a segment of the American people.

The public realm in any city abounds with streets, lanes, parks and public squares, but also public facilities such as the public lobbies and spaces that anyone from the public are able to legally access. It can also include areas below ground where the public may access public areas under streets and buildings, spaces below bridges and even the airspace above these public spaces. The public realm arguably also includes public vistas, namely what the public can see from a distance. As we expand our thinking about what should be considered the public realm in our villages, towns and cities, we should also expand it to include what we can’t necessarily see, but increasingly experience: the impact of broadband wireless services in public spaces and how it contributes to the sense of place in our communities.

Much of the discussion about economic growth and the availability of broadband assumes there is a vast gulf between rural and urban areas. I’ve written before about how, in some ways, trends in this century seem to be leading to something of a convergence of rural and urban areas.

So I thought it especially interesting that the NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association yesterday hosted a policy meeting in the US Capitol that was titled: “Beyond Rural Walls: Identifying Impacts and Interdependencies Among Rural and Urban Spaces”.