Colleges plan faster networks

The project, which is named GigU, is meant to draw high-tech startups in fields like health care, energy and telecommunications to the areas near the universities, many of which are in the Midwest or outside major cities. These zones would ideally function as hubs for building a new generation of faster computer networks, which could make the United States more competitive internationally.

For now, the plan is a work in progress, with the universities reaching out to telecommunications companies for suggestions and to corporations and nonprofits for business ideas. The institutions involved include Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Howard University, Duke University, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the University of Chicago.

“We’re not asking for government money,” said Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute who is heading the project. “We believe the right approach is to have the private sector fund the networks.”

By offering one-gigabit network connections — fast enough to download high-definition movies in less than a minute — not just to scientific researchers and engineers but to the homes and businesses that surround universities, the group aims to create a digital ecosystem that will attract new companies, ideas and educational models.

“It’s a sandbox for the research community and the residents, too,” said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western in Cleveland. Last year, Case Western set up a pilot programme in a several-block area near campus. The Case Connected Zone offers one-gigabit fibre-optic networking to 104 homes adjacent to the university. Within three months of its birth, Gonick said, three startups moved to the neighbourhood.

“We believe a small amount of investment can yield big returns for the American economy and our society,” he said.

The GigU members come mainly from the heartland — states like Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana and West Virginia — where they can potentially have a big impact on midsize communities across the country. The biggest universities already have access to higher-speed networks.

The colleges are preparing to talk to big telecommunications companies about ways to attract new ventures to their neighbourhoods through super-fast computing. Then, they will seek out business proposals for building the networks, “not decades hence, but in the next several years,” the group said in a statement.

Although the United States pioneered computer networks from the 1960s through the '90s, in recent years it has fallen behind in deploying and improving network technology. A recent study by the World Economic Forum found that although the United States ranked fifth in overall network “readiness” — a broad index comparing countries in the digital era — it came in 30th in network bandwidth available to the population.

In 2010, before joining the Aspen Institute, a policy think-tank, Levin was the staff director of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, which aims to make high-speed Internet service available throughout the United States.