Author and broadband thought leader Susan Crawford delivers a stirring keynote address at WRAL TechWire’s “Evolution of a Smarter City” event in Wilson. Yes, technology represents threats to jobs and life as we know it – but emerging opportunities, products and services also mean that humankind is at “just the beginning of an extraordinary era.”
With several kudos handed out to Wilson city leaders for having the insight and courage to build its own fiber network (Greenlight), the Harvard University lawyer gave a bravo performance to a crowd of some 200 people gathered for the event.
“San Francisco has been listening to Wilson,” she told the crowd, which cheered the comment. “They are considering building a dark fiber [unlit, designed for commercial deployment] network.”
Crawford pointed out that high-speed fiber infrastructure will enable delivery of better healthcare, face-to-face interaction, augmented reality, virtual reality, “real-time translation” and much more.
“Cities should be considering fiber networks” to put in place a platform over which governments can delivery a variety of services and encourage the private sector to “light up” fiber for communications, entertainment and much more, Crawford said.
Wilson has faced countless legal challenges in deciding to build and deploy fiber, but city leaders persevered, seeing fiber as a means of providing better service from 911 to utilities. Greenlight also includes cable TV and other entertainment, but Crawford said fiber offers much more potential than just high-speed gaming and movies on demand.
The author of two books about communications and technology with a third on the way, Crawford noted that she had visited Wilson three times to get a better understand of why and how this eastern N.C. community has put itself on the leading edge of municipal networks.
As for cities that don’t choose to build fiber, Crawford admonished them as being “not smart.”
However, Crawford also cautioned against cities embracing a plan that ends up favoring one company over another. She encouraged private-public partnerships among multiple providers, unlike Toronto’s recently unveiled smart cities plan with Google.
Crawford labeled the Toronto deal with Google’s Sidewalk Labs as “alarming.”
“This shouldn’t be a single company,” she said. “You should be able to do {the network] by yourself or at least with a set of corporation [partners.]”
The WRAL TechWire event also included two panel discussions – one concerning the building of infrastructure and the other focusing on how to build a smarter community culturally and economically.
[We will have more coverage about the event later.]
