The White House has launched a public-private partnership aiming to build ultra high-speed broadband networks in communities around the U.S. Unveiled Thursday, it's called US Ignite.
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The networks will be opened up to developers for use as a development sandbox for turning out new applications in key sectors of the economy.
"This network will become a test-bed for designing and deploying next-generation applications to support national priorities areas such as education, healthcare, energy, and advanced manufacturing," reads the White House's press release. "US Ignite will challenge students, startups, and industry leaders to create a new generation of applications and services that meet the needs of local communities while creating a broad range of job and investment opportunities."
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US Ignite will bring together corporations, non-profits and universities to build programmable broadband networks capable of achieving speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, which the White House claims is "100 times faster than today’s Internet."
The networks are expected to be rolled out in more than 25 cities over the next five to six years. Individual developers, startups and major corporations alike will be welcomed to experiment with the networks.
As examples of the networks' potential to spur innovation and growth, US Ignite is pointing to pilot cities such as Chattanooga, Tenn., where startups have developed "everything from improved transportation to disaster response to a smart energy-grid" using the cities' high-speed broadband network, as seen in the video embedded above.
The NSF is committing $20 million to the development of the new networks. It's also co-hosting a $500,000 competition along with Mozilla Foundation and the Department of Energy for coders developing high-speed apps using the new networks.
“Build the next generation Internet, and they will come,” said Bob Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet. “But not without encouragement and a willingness to be surprised. In the 1970s, many doubted there were uses for even 50-kilobit-per-second Internet. But soon application explorers came up with remote login, file transfer, and email. Pioneers have since found new worlds in telephony, television, publishing, commerce and social interactivity. Today, while investing in gigabit generations of Internet, we are again sending out our application explorers.”
How can these experimental high-speed networks change the way software development is done? Share your ideas in the comments below.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Olena_T
This story originally published on Mashable here.
