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Smarten Up: a guide to creating a smart community

by S. Albert

216 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1037; ISBN 1-4120-0667-8; US$21.56, C$27.95, EUR18.20, £12.61

Smarten Up! explains what's going on in the electronic age in ordinary language. The book is extremely useful, answering key technological and implementation questions for the development of online communities.

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about the book      about the author      excerpts      catalogue info

About the Book Smarten Up is a guide for communities who need to understand how to take advantage of the new online economy. It provides the reader with a clearer understanding of telecommunication infrastructure, online applications, strategies for implementation, and the regulatory environment. It is a guide written in easy to understand terminology for new leaders of telecommunication or networking projects, municipal councils, stakeholders in the education and healthcare fields, economic development practitioners, libraries, social service organizations, or students of community development strategic planning. Smarten Up explains how communities can create partnerships between public and private sector organizations to improve local or regional telecommunication infrastructure, develop new online applications that can improve quality of life and create synergy between organizations, and develop a business plan for creating a smart community.

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About the Author Dr. Sylvie Albert is the owner of Planned Approach Inc., a management-consulting firm in Ontario (Canada) specializing in smart community projects. Ms. Albert has worked on telecommunication projects across Canada, completed a doctoral dissertation on smart community development, published articles, and has been presenting at a number of conferences on this topic. She spent five years as a Director of economic development and served on two provincial committees on innovation and technology.

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Much like the rail system was very important at the turn of the last century for getting people and supplies to more remote locations of our country telecommunication is the remote access vehicle of the 21st century. Communities cannot afford not to have this important infrastructure, just as they could not afford not to have good roads.

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The hard infrastructure, that's the wires and the equipment, are only one part of the puzzle. There is no reason to build a broadband network if there are no applications or if people will not use it. Developing a Smart Community means having the right tools to import and export knowledge around the world. Tools as you will discover include infrastructure, people, and applications.

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Copper technologies work with electricity. An electrical impulse is sent and if the cable is too long (more than 8-10 kilometers or three to four miles for ADSL Internet service), then the electrical impulse must be amplified using equipment positioned along the way. This is in contrast to fibre optic technology which sends information using light. Copper is subject to interference (crosstalk) and is limited in the frequencies that can be used, which results in distance and speed capacities that are shorter and slower than optical fibre.

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The difference between wireless technologies is in the frequency it operates. Some air frequencies are regulated, which means that an operator needs a special licence from the government. Another difference is in the number of towers or antennae the technology requires to operate within a region, which has an effect on cost. The most relevant factor is that wireless technologies have limited bandwidth. This means they can offer a maximum speed, unlike other technologies such as fibre, which can be expanded almost limitlessly. Speed has an impact on the amount of information that can be sent from any given point. Although there are more compression techniques that allow a service provider to better utilize their bandwidth, there will be more applications that require more bandwidth and so, a community must be sensitive to its future bandwidth.

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One of the first decisions of a new community/regional network is whether they will only fulfill their own needs, or build an open access network to contribute to the economic development of the region. Whether it will over-build so as to accommodate investors to share the cost of construction and maintenance of the network, or meet only its own immediate needs. Governance is a combination of all the decision on how th network will be administered. The community needs to think of the management of the asset, the applications, the relationships, and the promotion of innovations.

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The poor bit rates and large delay times in the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW) are the sources of many complaints. Most users are currently connecting with a dial-up modem at speeds of 28,000 to 56,000 bits (28 to 56 Kilobits per second). Those who have cable modems or ADSL are connecting at higher speeds of up to 1 to 1.5 Megabits per second or 1000 Kilobits per second (approximately 20 to 27 times the speed of the dial-up connection). The quality and content of an application running either at the minimum data rate or at a suitable data rate will be remarkably different. As an example, let's look at an electronic newspaper operating at 2000 Kilobits/second (2 Mbit/s) integrating real-time streaming video and audio, and real-time block-transfer of other media such as pictures, text and graphics. It allows users to listen to the news when they like, and skip to the news of interest to them. This is an attractive alternative for newspaper and for TV news since it allows them to use different media to pass on their message and adds interactivity for the consumer. The same application at 28 Kbps suffers from considerable delay and does not allow the transmission of real-time streaming of audio and video. The user might be disappointed by this kind of service. As another example, downloading a good quality movie using a 56 Kbps move modem could take 11 days, while over a broadband connection of 100 Mbps, it would take only a minutes. Having a broadband connection will be the deciding factor of whether to use or not to use and application.

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Catalogue Information

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