Broadband providers: Give the cities a helping hand - FierceTelecom

To expand broadband opportunities, cities and towns are going to need assistance from local service providers, argued Chicago's CIO Hardik Bhatt during the Friday morning keynote speech at the SUPERCOMM trade show. In order to do that, schools, for example, will need far more than a paltry T1 (1.5 Mbps) of access.

Bhatt said a local effort to enhance technical training and education via the creation of a school centered on IT and telecom was stifled when organizers found the only connections they could get were two T1 connections. "We wanted our students to be able to have interaction with students in other countries," Bhatt said during the SUPERCOMM speech. "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..."