FutureForward Blacksburg

BLACKSBURG, Va., – Virginia Tech and the Town of Blacksburg have recently submitted a joint application named “FutureForward Blacksburg” for Google's “Think Big with a Gig” experiment to build ultra-high speed fiber to the home networks in a number of locations across the country. As part of the Town of Blacksburg’s submittal, Virginia Tech Geospatial Information Sciences prepared a video that illustrates a number of applications that citizens, students, government officials, and businesses in the Town would be able to use if a gigabit Ethernet were made available to them.

Blacksburg currently has connectivity to national Tier One networks including Internet2 and National Lambda Rail; however, this high bandwidth capacity does not reach residential areas and apartment complexes. If Blacksburg is selected, Google proposes to bring gigabit fiber to the last mile, providing these users with Internet speeds 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today.

The video demonstrates how this extremely powerful Internet access could greatly enhance the town’s planning and modeling capabilities, improve emergency response communications, and enhanced long-distance medical diagnosis. Virginia Tech and the Town communities could also receive shared benefits through next generation classrooms and teaching technologies, real-time online learning atmospheres, shared virtual reality environments for research and the arts, and 3-D routing and viewshed research.

Virginia Tech President Charles W. Steger is featured in the video and commented how data rich environments and just-in-time information systems will be key to the success of Virginia Tech’s new college that is currently being planned. He described it as, “highly experimental and will change the paradigm for undergraduate learning... We are going to change the way in which young people go about addressing and thinking about the problems they face in the future.”

In his own video response (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFxfxiHUSI), Rick Boucher, Virginia Representative and chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s technology and Internet subcommittee, spoke in favor of Blacksburg as a location for Google's project, "Blacksburg's accomplishments are compelling proof that they will make optimal use of this extraordinary infrastructure that Google proposes to build. I urge Google to give serious, favorable consideration to Blacksburg as the location for their fiber to the home testbed project."

The “FutureForward Blacksburg” video is available for viewing on Virginia Tech’s eCorridors program You Tube page. The creators of the video encourage those interested in seeing Blacksburg selected as part of this experiment to make their comments known by posting a comment on the video’s page. The video can also be easily shared with other social networks by clicking the share link.

The mission of the eCorridors program at Virginia Tech is to facilitate and promote the ability for every person, organization, and community in Virginia and beyond to have the capability, at a reasonable cost, to produce and access high volume information and services in the networked world. More information on how eCorridors is working toward this objective is available at the program website (http://www.ecorridors.vt.edu).

Virginia Tech Geospatial Information Sciences is a geospatial initiative of Virginia Tech, a division of Information Technology's Strategic Partnership Initiatives and applies geospatial technologies and analytical methods in the areas of research and collaboration, safety and security, community broadband, energy and sustainability, health information technology, and lowering barriers to the use of GIS tools and data.

Related stories and links:
Watch “FutureForward Blacksburg” the video at the eCorridors YouTube page
Watch Representative Rick Boucher speak in support of Blacksburg (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpFxfxiHUSI)
Virginia Tech News story - Virginia Tech, Town of Blacksburg team up to attract Google (http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/story.php?relyear=2010&itemno=144)
Learn about the “Google Fiber for Communities” experiment (http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/)
Learn about the video creators at Virginia Tech GIS (http://www.gis.vt.edu/)
Test your broadband on the Virginia Tech Community Broadband Map (http://www.ecorridors.vt.edu/maps/broadbandmap.php)

IMAGE INFORMATION: FutureForward Blacksburg is the name of the application submitted by the Town of Blacksburg, VA to Google for their fiber to the home experiment, "Think Big with a Gig". The video was prepared by the VTGIS group at Virginia Tech during the month of March 2010.

Taken from eCorridors Youtube Channel
Written By Patrick Fay
March 25, 2010

Mapping out Broadband Connectivity

Most folks who have been working with broadband technology over the years will readily attest to the difficulty associated with creating maps of places where high-speed connectivity is available and affordable. This difficulty arises from the fact that in order to be successful, such efforts depend on the willingness of service providers to share their data on the location of their infrastructure, which is something they have historically been very reluctant to do, since they regard such information as proprietary.

Here at eCorridors, we're proud to announce the release of a new application that takes an alternative approach to the mapping of broadband connectivity. It's called the "Community Broadband Map" and lives at http://www.ecorridors.vt.edu/maps/broadbandmap.php. We consider it to be a beta release, so if you encounter any problems (or have any comments) please report them on the discussion forum.

The site consists of a speed testing application, the open-source "NDT" tool developed for Internet2 (http://e2epi.internet2.edu/ndt/), and a Google Map, tied together by a form through which users can measure their speed, mark their location, add optional descriptive information about their connection, and add themselves to the map.

The focus of this particular endeavor is to get an assessment of residential broadband trends, so those who do the speed test and add a marker are encouraged to do so from their home connection.

This represents a "bottom-up" approach to broadband mapping, insofar as it is driven by the voluntary contribution of connectivity information by users. One can imagine numerous potential uses of this map as it becomes populated with a sufficient amount of data. In areas where the map reveals an abundance of high-speed connectivity, communities could use the map to illustrate this fact, as a means to attract technology workers and their employers. In areas where the map reveals a lack of high-speed connectivity, communities could use the map as a means to attract new ISPs, or as justification for developing their own infrastructure, where permitted by law. Individuals could use the map as an input to personal location decisions. All these uses of the map, of course, must proceed with the awareness that the data behind it may contain errors. No individual data point should be treated as authoritative, but the aggregate trends across a given geographic area are more robust. While there are known validity issues associated with both Internet speed testing and the use of user-submitted data, it is our hope that with enough data points the "signal to noise" ratio of good data to bad will be favorable, and we (and the rest of the world) will be able to make some inferences about general trends in connectivity.

The amount of useful information the map can convey will increase with the number of users that contribute data. Help the community build a map of the current state of broadband availability by adding your own marker!

By Seth Peery