OSTP Roundtable on Gigabit Applications:

OSTP hosted a successful meeting with about forty participants from industry, academia, city/region/campus infrastructure projects and providers, and government agency representatives at the White House Conference Center on January 19, 2011. The focus of the meeting was on how best to advance novel and useful applications and services requiring high bandwidth, such as for health and wellbeing, clean energy, advanced manufacturing, transportation and education.

Lev Gonick from Case Western set the tone with his talk on the Case Connection Zone, Case Western and Cleveland's gigabit fiber to the home pilot research project. The project includes open and public Alpha House, the Beta Block (104 residences with 1G wired connections), and the University Circle Innovation Zone (5,000 public housing, senior citizens, and other multiple and single dwelling units with ultra high bandwidth.) Lev talked about the smart grid of energy sensors, education and smart health applications. One example was particularly compelling. He talked about an experiment with seniors that have dinner with their distant grandchildren over high resolution telepresence systems. It showed significant increases in memory recall the following day compared to the seniors who just communicated via telephone.

Chip Elliott talked about the Global Environment for Network Innovation project, which is exploring networks of the future. GENI is now going live across the US. Since it is not feasible to build a research testbed as big as the Internet, the project is research-enabling existing testbeds, commercial equipment, campuses, regional and backbone networks. Since students are most often the early adopters and innovators, the focus has been on connecting campuses across the country. The next step is to research-enable cities that are now considered "islands of broadband." This will clearly allow citizens and city entrepreneurs to live in the future!

Representatives from gignation talked about their goal of building an eco-system of communities, including networks and innovators where continuous learning can occur among their members, and from ongoing research and connections with others around the globe. They have developed a suite of communication mechanisms --blogs, seminars, innovation funds, newsletters, and public policy initiatives -- for sharing best practices and disseminating knowledge.

OSTP wrapped up the discussion by asking the participants to think hard about a public private partnership that would transform the status quo and connect the islands of broadband with other communities and regions as a platform for US innovation.

We appreciate the time that these incredibly busy and talented leaders from industry, academia and government took to participate in this initial meeting, which launches a national effort for high bandwidth network innovation.

Gigabit Applications Roundtable Attendees:

• Steve Anderson, Salesforce.com Foundation
• Peter Arzberger, NSF
• Kwasi Asare, US Dept of Education
• Tegene Baharu, DC government
• Jeff Bergeron, HP
• Joe Berthold, Ciena
• Alan Blatecky, NSF
• Aneesh Chopra, OSTP
• Geoff Daily, FiberCorps
• Heidi Dempsey, GENI Project Office
• Chip Elliott, GENI Project Office
• Charles Friedman, ONC
• Lev Gonick, Case Western
• Eric Greenman, Intel
• Elizabeth Grossman, Microsoft
• Chris Hogan, UTOPIA (Utah Telecom Open Infrastructure Agency
• Terry Huval, Lafayette Utilities System (LUS)
• Suzi Iacono, NSF
• Jim Ingraham, EPB
• Farnam Jahaniam, University of Michigan (now NSF)
• Tom Kalil, OSTP
• Charles Kalmanek, AT&T Labs
• Paul Kouroupas, Global Crossing
• Jim Kurose, University of Massachusetts
• H. David Lambert, Internet2
• Ed Lazowska, University of Washington
• Richard Lynch, Verizon
• Todd Marriott, UTOPIA (Utah Telecom Open Infrastructure Agency
• Keith A. Marzullo, NSF
• Nick Maynard, OSTP
• Christopher McLean, USDA Rural Development
• Doug Montgomery, National Institute of Standards and Technology
• Jon Peha, OSTP (now CMU)
• Larry Smarr, UCSD
• Kurt Snodgrass, National Lambda Rail
• Megan Stull, Google
• Jamie Voris, Disney
• David Ward, Juniper Networks
• Steve Wolff, Cisco
• Richard Woundy, Comcast
• Dov Zimring, Google