A who’s who in broadband will be in Dallas this week for the Broadband Communities Summit.

Starting on Tuesday, this will be the place where folks like national broadband strategist and Gig.U founder Blair Levin, Google Fiber’s Chief Milo Medin, and many other blue-chip broadband minds will gather to discuss the latest trends in telecommunications.

The summit always percolates with the latest big ideas in broadband, event organizations noted in a recent blog, and one idea with big potential that has caught fire in tandem with Google’s “fiberhoods” is demand aggregation.

There is growing recognition by the public sector, businesses and communities that telecommunications services and infrastructure play an important role in economic transformation, sustainability and social well-being. In this new environment, greater alignment is being sought among these entities for public benefit as well as generating revenue.

Demand aggregation is one strategy that is being employed to improve telecommunications outcomes in targeted regions. In this context, it is about pooling the demand for telecommunications services in a particular area or sector and securing enough likely customers ahead of time to reduce the risk of rolling out a new network or service.

The Google Fiber network is a perfect example of this methodology as it is built-by-demand, with Google building first to the fiberhoods with the highest rankings. That’s how Kansas City was selected first.

Blair Levin recently explained to Broadband Communities Magazine that the Gig.U project aims to leverage naturally occurring demand aggregation in cities that already were hotbeds of technology innovation. Levin noted that he has incorporated the effects of demand aggregation into an equation on “changing the math” for broadband deployments.

Demand aggregation has been used by Australian and American state governments, European communities, and the Canadian government to assist in driving new broadband investments, particularly into areas outside centralized or metro business districts. The term also recently was featured at an FCC workshop.

Demand aggregation as a business model may be the next key to rolling out high-bandwidth, high-subscriber counts and massive adoption of gigabit broadband services throughout the United States. Combining e-government, e-education and e-health initiatives can be a significant contributor in demand aggregation strategies. Achieving this alignment for high-speed broadband services will be an important lever – and certainly will be topic of discussion this week in Dallas.

This is the 10th annual Broadband Communities Summit since the launch of the Towns & Technologies event series with an emphasis on fiber to the premises. Each year, the event has expanded its program, increased the number of attendees, and attracted new sponsors and exhibitors.

More than 950 registrants attended in 2012, and more than 1,000 are expected to participate this week.