Obama Signs Order for Full-Bore Broadband Expansion

President Obama has an executive order that aims to it easier and cheaper to build out broadband infrastructure in the U.S. The order will require several federal agencies to band and offer carriers one approach leasing federal assets for broadband deployment. The White House has established U.S. Ignite, a public-private partnership creating new services.

President Barack Obama Thursday signed an executive order intended make broadband construction along federal roadways and properties in the United State effective and up to 90 percent cheaper.

Building a nationwide broadband network will strengthen the U.S. economy and more Americans back to work, the president said.

The White House also announced establishment of U.S. Ignite, a public-private partnership aimed creating a new wave of services that will together software developers and engineers from government and industry representatives from communities, schools, hospitals and institutions.

"We creating and transmitting data a rate of 8 trillion bits a second, and the road is just large enough," W. Hord Tipton, executive director of (ISC)2 and former CIO of U.S. Department of the Interior, told TechNewsWorld.

What the White House Wants

The executive order require the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, the Interior, Transportation and Veterans Affairs as as the U.S. Postal Service to band together and offer carriers one approach leasing federal assets for broadband deployment.

It also requires available federal assets and the requirements leasing be provided departmental websites, that the Federal Infrastructure Projects Dashboard will enable public tracking regional broadband deployment projects, and that departments help carriers to deploy broadband infrastructure when streets are under construction than having to dig them up over again.

U.S. Ignite will create a national network of communities and campuses programmable broadband services operating up to 1Gbps. This network will become a test bed designing and deploying next-generation applications to support national priorities as education, healthcare, energy and advanced manufacturing.

About 100 cities, corporations and non-profit entities will team with more than 60 national research universities in U.S. Ignite. The program will challenge students, startups and industry leaders to create the new apps.

Spend, Spend, Spend

Carriers like Verizon and Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSK) announcing new pilot cities on their networks that will participate in U.S. Ignite, the White House said. Non-profits such the Mott Foundation are working U.S. Ignite to deliver new community programs such as hack days and startup weekends speed up the transition of newly developed next-generation apps the market, to the White House. Meanwhile, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Mozilla Foundation, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, launched a design competition for the development of apps for high-speed communities.

Elsewhere, the NSF committing US$20 million to prototype and deploy new technologies to speed the development of ultra-high-speed programmable broadband networks. The NSF has invested about $40 million in the Global Environment for Networking Innovations (GENI), which connects than a dozen universities through next-generation broadband. That network serves a virtual lab and testbed for next-gen apps in the areas US Ignite expected to cover.

Meanwhile, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture are supporting U.S. Ignite funding six carriers to expand broadband networks while creating new community-based services. The Department of Defense is connecting military families base with new services from Ignite, the White House stated.

Adapted and abridged from: TechNewsWorld, June 14, 2012.