creating regional broadband opportunities
Tied in, turned on
Published on Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Cape Cod Times Opinion
Tied in, turned on
Wireless broadband project is key to creating knowledge-based jobs.
January 02, 2008 6:00 AM
Speaking, appropriately enough, at the Chamber of Commerce-sponsored "economic summit" in October, new Cape Cod Commission executive director Paul Niedzwiecki said we have to be "realistic" about what kind of jobs the Cape will create in the future. We're an island, after all. "We won't be dragging anyone over the bridge and turning any of our towns into company towns," he said.
Economic growth would come from the same places it always had — farming, fishing, entrepreneurs — a poetic way of describing the sorts of jobs that sprout naturally and can be sustained in this semi-rural environment with its affection for natural beauty.
Niedzwiecki strongly implied he sees the commission's job as laying the groundwork for appropriate economic development — with planning, zoning, utility infrastructure and growth incentives.
This "build-it-and-they-will-come" approach has also been taken by the other Barnstable County agency with a hand in economic development, the Cape Cod Economic Development Council. It distributes grants from the Cape and Islands license plate revenue.
"We view economic development in a macro way," wrote CCEDC chairman David Willard in these pages. The work is not buying billboards and recruiting in other states. Far from it. The grant criteria are as immediate as job training for much-needed nursing assistants and as long range as helping towns design and sell to voters the progressive zoning changes needed to achieve economic development goals.
One CCEDC-supported project has been flying under the radar, but has great promise to hatch Cape Cod entrepreneurs. OpenCape will be a system of radio transmitters to allow high-capacity wireless broadband Internet service all over the peninsula.
The region is badly deficient now, because there is not a large enough year-round population to justify investment by cable and telephone companies in high-capacity lines down every lane. Dan Gallagher, executive director of information technology at Cape Cod Community College, one of the institutional partners in the project, called the Cape the "North Korea of broadband."
With strong finance and technical support from the Massachusetts Technology Council, the wireless "backhaul" system is in design phase, with the first link, between UMass-Dartmouth and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, already operating. Cape Cod Community College will be the next hub. The plan envisions transmitters down the "backbone" of the Cape as a wholesale data pipeline from which commercial and institutional users can draw.
The system will allow the kind of industrial-strength exchange of data files needed by science research and large-scale commerce.
Consider OpenCape the "fourth bridge," making the Cape competitive in the knowledge economy with Providence, Boston — the whole world.
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