Cities need broadband help, Chicago CTO says

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, Chicago CIO Hardik Bhatt told the Supercomm audience today.

Bhatt 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 as 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.

Chicago conducted a study on digital excellence that looked at the reason residents don’t buy broadband, when they can, and found many were either not computer savvy or were unaware of the broadband Internet’s potential.

“We have issues of availability, affordability and awareness that we need to address,” Bhatt said.

Asian and European cities are moving faster than U.S. cities in providing Internet access at speeds that stimulates innovation and fuels economic development, Bhatt said. “We are moving to slowly.”

“Innovation is very important to get our cities ahead of the global competition and make them leaders again,” Bhatt said.”Broadband is the most critical platform for innovation and growth.”