AirFiber Joins French Telecom Alcatel in
Selling Metro Networks
In John Eger’s way of thinking, a “smart community” is something very specific.
The SDSU professor defines it as “a community that makes a conscious decision to aggressively deploy technology as a catalyst to solving its social and business needs.”
Specifically it’s information technology that the communities decide to deploy , things like a broadband infrastructure.
Such an infrastructure needs spreading around, here in the western United States and around the world. Providing advanced communications to the areas that lack them would bridge the “digital divide” , the gap between the haves and have-nots.
After all, the economy today is largely based on information.
Eger presented “An Urgent Need for World Communications Development” early last month at a conference in Singapore.
Some excerpts from his speech:
– “We can if we set our minds to it, (if we) organize our intellect and marshal our collective assets, help communities the world over make the transition from poverty and backwardness to prosperity and onto the road to progress in the new knowledge-based information economy and society.”
– Forming smart communities is all about “the promotion of economic development, job growth and an increased quality of life.” Installing technology “is not an end in itself, but only a means to reinventing cities for a new global information economy and society with clear and compelling community benefits.”
– Communities “must develop a coherent and compelling vision” about how new information networks are going to help the community, both economically and in other ways.
– “I fear too many of us will fail to see the connection between the events of Sept. 11 and the urgency of building an alliance for smart communities worldwide. Never before in the history of the world has the call been more urgent to do something to make the fruits of our technology and the power of communication available to every man, woman and child.” Eger’s speech also had nice things to say about San Diego’s transformation into a smart community.
Eger is a Lionel Van Deerlin Professor of Communications and Public Policy at SDSU, as well as executive director of the university’s International Center for Communications.
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Teaming Up:
San Diego-based AirFiber, Inc. and French telecom giant Alcatel are marketing their equipment together, offering customers a comprehensive metropolitan area network system.
AirFiber offers free-space optics to get communications to a multi-tenant building. Alcatel, for its part, offers the switches to handle the signals within the building.
AirFiber’s software and hardware harness laser light to create a high-bandwidth communications link across open spaces. The lasers are safe on the eyes. The connection is carrier-class.
In unrelated news, San Diego-based SourcingLink has hooked up with the WorldWide Retail Exchange of Alexandria, Va.
WorldWide Retail Exchange is a business-to-business exchange providing merchandise for the retail industry. Exchange members are foreign and domestic; they range from Albertsons to Walgreen Co.
The exchange will use SourcingLink’s strategic negotiation services for online negotiations and auctions.
SourcingLink trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol SNET and began last week trading in the 60 cent range.
In other news, Loudcloud, Inc., the Internet infrastructure service company from Sunnyvale, is offering Urchin to all of its customers. Urchin is the Web traffic reporting and analysis software from San Diego’s Quantified Systems, Inc.
Send high-tech news to Graves via e-mail at bgraves@sdbj.com.
