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Many universities enjoy ultra-fast broadband Internet connections that support the far-flung research and communication activities of their students and faculty members. Those networks, however, have typically ended at the edge of the campus, available only to the university community through an institutional contract with the service provider.

But what if those networks crept past the university gates and into the surrounding towns and cities?

A group of 29 universities across the country on Wednesday launched Gig.U: The University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, a coalition that will work to entice broadband providers to bring Internet service with connection speeds hundreds of times faster than those generally available to businesses and consumers today to the communities surrounding universities, as well as to expand the digital infrastructure on the participating campuses.

"We are really talking about orders of magnitude more of broadband connectivity," Lev Gonick, chief information Officer and vice president of information technology services at Case Western Reserve University, told reporters on a conference call.

Bridging the gap between university, community

Gig.U begins with the premise that robust network infrastructure will be the backbone for the basic research and innovation that will drive the next phase of U.S. economic development. But too often universities operate as if in a vacuum, where breakthroughs in science, medicine or technology can languish before they find their way into a marketable product or service.

By bringing an ultra-fast broadband network into the surrounding communities, the coalition hopes to create a testbed environment that will attract new startup companies around the participating universities, helping to bridge the gap between the higher education and business communities.

"We in higher education are often challenged by town-gown issues," Gonick said. "We understand that the health and well-being of our universities is intimately connected to the health and well-being of the communities surrounding us."

The novel approach that Gig.U is taking comes as the latest initiative to address what many experts regard as a shortfall in the U.S. broadband infrastructure, seen as a critical element for nurturing economic development in fast-moving industries, such as health care, smart energy and education.

Gig.U is seeking to confront the issue from the demand side. The big cable and telecom companies and other Internet service providers make plans for their network upgrades and expansions according to a cost-benefit calculus. And just as sparse subscriber bases have deterred broadband providers from expanding service into many rural areas, the perceived limitations on demand for super high-speed service has generally kept connection speeds on the order of 1 gigabit per second confined to universities and research institutions, and even in those environments deployments have been inconsistent.

The Gig.U institutions are looking to challenge that notion, and plan to coordinate with businesses and officials in their communities to reach out directly to broadband providers to make the business case for deploying ultra-high-speed networks both on campus and beyond.

"One of the things universities have noted is that market structure doesn't always serve the very high bandwidth demands of universities," said Blair Levin, director of the Gig.U coalition. "Our thought here is to see what we can do to have the market meet the demand of the university communities, but have the private sector do it."

Levin argued that the communities surrounding universities are ideal environments for ultra-fast broadband deployments, given their often dense populations and high demand from residents and the institutions themselves. Moreover, the networks could create a fertile environment for young businesses built around the commercialization of emerging university research.

"We're very excited about this project because we believe [the] next generation of networks will enable next-generation opportunities," he said.

Levin is uniquely positioned to lead the new effort. Currently a fellow at the Aspen Institute, he previously served as the executive director of the Federal Communications Commission's national broadband plan, the nation's first comprehensive blueprint for achieving universal access to high-speed Internet service.

Levin stressed that the new initiative is about reinventing the business model for private ISPs, who would still shoulder the cost of funding the new networks, noting that no public funding would be involved.

Google fiber as a model

The coalition draws inspiration from a project Google is currently undertaking to deliver 1 Gbps Internet service to Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo., through a fiber-optic network. Google selected the Kansas City area through a review process in which the company evaluated applications from some 1,100 communities after first announcing its experiment in February 2010.

"Our process would be in some sense a flip of what Google did," Levin said, explaining how Gig.U members plan to proactively court service providers with a business case for deploying ultra-fast networks on college campuses and the surrounding environments. "Our notion is let's get the best targets for gigabit connectivity together in what we might see as demand aggregation."

Levin and officials from the participating universities have held preliminary discussions with service providers, but Gig.U has not yet secured any deployment commitments. He described the project as being only in the "first inning."

As a first step, the Gig.U coalition will canvas members of the university and surrounding areas through a request for information (RFI) process to gather data on the market viability for high-speed deployments in research-oriented communities, information that will then be presented to broadband providers to demonstrate the business model for new networks.

"This is about creating a collaborative platform on which one can determine ... what you might think of as where the market is," Levin said. "I think there are a lot of ideas that can come out of the marketplace that can improve the business case."

Practical applications

Gonick described Gig.U as a continuation of the historical role universities have played in the evolution of the Internet's infrastructure. Case Western is one of many schools that have been involved with the government-funded ARPANET of the 1970s, the project that first employed the packet-switching technology that is the core architecture of today's Internet. More recently, Case Western has participated in non-commercial high-speed networking projects like National LambdaRail and Internet 2.

"Universities have a critical role to play in the research and development efforts of our nation," he said. "We in higher education have an absolute challenge and privilege of living the future today."

Already, Case Western has been marshaling its broadband network to engage members of the Cleveland community. Through the CaseConnectionZone.org initiative, Case Western offers a mentoring program that pairs high school students with peers at the university, and even offers access to online courses.

That project also encompasses efforts to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, health and wellness through remote monitoring and access to specialists, public safety through an online neighborhood watch program, and smart energy management.

The inaugural 29 Gig.U member universities are:

• Arizona State University
• Case Western Reserve University
• Colorado State University
• Duke University
• George Mason University
• Howard University
• Indiana University
• Michigan State University
• North Carolina State University
• Penn State University
• University of Alaska
• University of Chicago
• University of Florida
• University of Hawaii
• University of Illinois
• University of Kentucky
• University of Louisville
• University of Maryland
• University of Michigan
• University of Missouri
• University of Montana
• University of New Mexico
• University of North Carolina
• University of South Florida
• University of Virginia
• University of Washington
• Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech)
• Wake Forest University
• West Virginia University

For related news and other information from Schools.com, see:

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• College students' study habits evolving with technology
• 4 'stupid myths' of online education
• Can higher education fix the cybersecurity shortfall?