Planning and Building the Smart City: How Dark Fiber Empowers the Communities of Tomorrow
Smart cities are one of the most anticipated technology use cases of our time. While the world has dreamt of technology-optimized environments for years or even decades, the first steps in building smart capabilities have arrived. Now, the truly smart city is no longer a dream on the horizon—it’s here today.
Leveraging information and communications technologies that pair personal devices and other wireless nodes with city-wide intelligent infrastructure, smart cities have the potential to dramatically increase citizens’ quality of life and government’s operational efficiencies. Cutting costs, finding new ways to drive enhanced sustainability, speeding up response times or interactivity for municipal service delivery, innovative telehealth, self-driving vehicles—these are just a few of the benefits that can be realized.
Creating a Smart Future: What Must Come First?
Incorporating these futuristic capabilities requires proper preparation. Robust underlying infrastructure—the foundation that enables driverless cars and other similar applications—must be in place before digital transformations can be accomplished. Investing in infrastructure that promotes data mobility, ensures robust bandwidth for the massive amount of information that will be gathered and delivers high levels of security for mission-critical data is all vital. To ensure they have the security, reliability, geographic reach and more in preparation for smart initiatives, more and more cities are investing in fiber optic solutions. Still, understanding the options out in the market, such as dark fiber, and what benefits they bring can be overwhelming. This is why a trusted and experienced fiber partner is key for success.
Achieving Future-Ready Networks
FiberLight has helped numerous customers pave the way for smart city applications and brings thorough experience and insight into the solutions that will offer everything a city requires to build a better network foundation. Here are a few examples of some successful partnerships. Click on the links to read more about each story:
- The City of Bastrop, Texas, enabled robust, redundant, high-capacity connectivity to support their mission to provide efficient, innovative and proactive services that enhance residents’ quality of life and foster ongoing economic growth. With FiberLight’s 1Gbps Enhanced Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) fiber network investment, Bastrop resolved existing limitations to ensure always-on capabilities and expanded digital opportunities for online business applications, new residential service use cases and more.
- The City of Roswell, Georgia, enhanced resident and administrative capabilities with an expanded dark fiber network, ensuring the city could incorporate smart city applications by establishing a 400GB bandwidth connection to an adjacent data center. This expanded dark fiber infrastructure and connection to a secure and resilient data center environment offered near limitless scalability, increased network performance and redundancy—all vital for smart use cases.
- Amarillo Independent School District (AISD) in Texas teamed up with FiberLight to create increased bandwidth and capacity, enhanced speed and augmented reliability with a 70-mile dark fiber network expansion. Subsidized by the E-rate program and Texas state matching funds, this project provides proof of concept for the educational benefits of robust networking and digital transformation. Municipal fiber deployments like this one are also instrumental in facilitating overall community growth and support, creating a positive economic impact in Amarillo by attracting additional business partners to the area and supporting smart city applications.
- SereneIT, a next-generation engineering IT firm, leveraged FiberLight’s networking insight to incorporate 1Gbps Enhanced DIA and 1Gbps of point-to-point, private line Ethernet connecting two network data centers. This project exemplifies how a strategic fiber network expansion can enable users to cater to increasingly complex IT demands, including those that will undoubtedly be required by smart city applications that incorporate Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, a host of artificially intelligent devices and more.
Managing Complexity, Adding Flexibility
Whether municipalities are looking to purchase dark fiber assets and own their fiber network the added stress or complexity of building it themselves or leverage a fully managed dark fiber solution, FiberLight ensures that networks are ready to take on tomorrow’s smart city.
Not all fiber providers offer the same purchase options or trusted partnership—this is why we try to make the search for a fiber provider easy, so customers can focus on their future. FiberLight has the construction experience to build a network that suits specific needs, and can take care of the operations, maintenance and legal aspects of the project, while the municipality takes advantage of beneficial owner economics.
Power your smart city for the future, not just today.