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Spokane: It’s not just wired, it’s intelligent

During the decades from Fred Hoyle to Stephen Hawking, cosmologists have become more and more certain that the universe we live in was created in an explosive ‘Big Bang’ billions of years ago.

Steve Simmons
Special to The Spokesman-Review

As Kim Pearman-Gillman and I recently discovered while co-chairing Spokane’s nomination for the `Intelligent Community of the Year’ award, Spokane had its own `Big Bang’ for connectivity in the early 1990s, resulting in a very large and diverse optical fiber zone around the city today.

The `Intelligent Community of the Year’ award is sponsored annually by the World Teleport Association (WTA), based in New York’s Silicon Alley.

According to the WTA, an `intelligent community’ is not just a heavily wired community — but one in which broadband wiring is used to dramatically improve the economic, social, and civic aspects of the community.

To qualify, a community must have a planned and documented approach that created a broadband infrastructure, and also show that the infrastructure has been used over time to implement community improvements in designated areas. The areas include: creation of a ‘knowledge work force’; the attraction of risk capital, tech industry and jobs; bridging the digital divide, and marketing the resulting combination of infrastructure and supported activities.

Spokane’s nomination was made possible by very generous donations by Billie Moreland and Associates (who wrote the nomination casebook) and ILF Media (who designed and produced the nomination DVD), with additional help from Avista and the city of Spokane as well as several community volunteers.

Spokane’s "Big Bang" arrived because, as resource-based industries like mining and lumber lost ground over many decades, the city’s service industries (health care, law, education, finance and more) became stronger and more technically ambitious.

By the late 1980s, when the Washington Legislature had conceived the Riverpoint campus and SIRTI as a way to boost the metro area’s high-tech future, the service industries were also thinking and planning for high-tech, especially networked applications.

Each service sector is based, in essence, on bridging between a community of need and a community of service providers — and what could be more natural, as networking became increasingly well-known, to use this new technology as a new type of bridge.

By 1994, each service sector was planning separately for networked applications.

•Several regional libraries, for example, had planned and executed a method for linking and sharing resources over computer networks.

•Inland Northwest Health Services was formed to improve patient health care delivery.

•Spokane School District 81 had completed a technology study calling for facilities and technology to support and strengthen the educational program.

•The Inland Northwest Community Access Network (TINCAN) was formed at Eastern Washington University.

•Network designers at Avista, formerly Washington Water Power, began the design of an optical fiber network for the Spokane metropolitan area.

All these forces — the cosmic energy behind Spokane’s eventual "Big Bang" — came together in the form of the SIRTI Telecommunications Committee (STC) during the first quarter of 1994.

The regional universities, libraries, telecommunications companies, network technology companies, Avista and SIRTI were directly represented on this large strategic committee. And because the committee was formed of individual members who were very active in Spokane’s network community, the non-member organizations and industries were at `one degree of separation’ because a closely allied worker was on the committee.

The STC quickly gained rapport and a vision of how the separate service-driven application areas could come together in a coherent way.

By March 1994, a strategic plan for the Spokane region had been formulated with three major recommendations. The first was to deploy optical fiber throughout the metro area, because of its 30-year lifetime and unlimited potential bandwidth.

The second was to seek a mixture of vendor specific lit fiber, and general-purpose dark fiber, to permit experimental and niche applications.

The third was to work closely with the existing service industries to plan for fiber, and to find applications that could justify the cost of the fiber — and then, perhaps, go on to become a source of regional income.

The written result was then passed to the SIRTI administration for actions and further planning, but, perhaps more important, the individual members took the STC plan back to their organizations, co-workers and community associates. That way, virtually all service sectors soon heard of the ideas in the STC plan.

Like a nuclear chain reaction, the "Big Bang" was triggered. Of course it has taken several years to take full effect — and we continue to reap growing benefits of this visionary approach.

In the `Intelligent Community of the Year’ nomination, space was limited. So, brief mention was made of about two dozen significant applications of the Spokane metro area’s bandwidth, and a few very compelling applications were strongly spotlighted. These were the Terabyte Triangle (for downtown economic development and business collaboration); Inland Northwest Health Services (for many highly innovative applications in health-care networking); School District 81’s EMAN project (for advanced networked educational services), and the new Avista sponsored VPnet (for higher education collaboration, research and economic development).

These applications have in common the essence of Spokane’s case as a world leader. They all involve metropolitan services deployed in new and creative ways over ultra-fast fiber-based links.

The World Teleport Association will announce a group of seven finalists for the Intelligent Community of the Year award in July, and the final winner in October.

•Dr. Steve Simmons has been a professor of computer science at Eastern Washington University since 1990. He is the founder of the Terabyte Triangle economic project.

http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=062903&ID=s1373616&cat=section.business

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