The National Science Foundation invites white papers from individuals and organizations (e.g., academic, non-profit, industry, associations, government agencies) that want to express particular interest in the US Ignite initiative -- as a partner/resource/infrastructure provider; researcher/innovator for gigabit application development in areas of national priority; or as an entity willing to set up a not-for-profit to govern US Ignite resources in a public-private partnership.

Request for White Papers

Achieving the vision for the US Ignite initiative will require the combined resources of industry, government, and academia. For example, industry can provide monetary and in-kind contributions, the latter taking the form of networked communities, hardware, software and/or technical expertise necessary to create the US Ignite test bed. Industry efforts will be informed and supported by NSF's existing expertise developed through the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) program, managed by BBN. Government can encourage and incent participation in US Ignite. Researchers in academia and entrepreneurs everywhere can support infrastructure and application development and deployment.

The formation of a public-private partnership, whose mission is to make the US the world leader in applications and services for ultra-fast broadband networks¹, is also proposed. This would be housed within a 501(c)(3) organization, making it easy for commercial companies that choose to become members to coordinate their pre-commercial support for US Ignite.

The principal roles and responsibilities of the Partnership include:

• Convene industry, university, and community partners for strategic planning and sharing of best practices;
• Find and support additional industry and community partners;
• Coordinate developer community activities through events and partner applications competitions; and
• Deploy and/or support a third party applications delivery platform.

To express interest in managing the Partnership, one should be part of an organization with sufficient national presence to provide a strong coordinating function across communities and universities. One should have significant expertise in next-generation wireline and wireless networks as well as application delivery platforms. One should possess strong existing relationships with industry, foundations, universities, and agencies. And, finally, one should have community project experience, including educational and outreach activities in underserved populations.

Anyone can express interest in US Ignite. Each interested individual or organization should submit a two-page white paper to usignite@nsf.gov indicating their level of interest and the role they wish to play within US Ignite. We will analyze the submissions in sequential two week periods over the fall. The first round of white papers should be submitted by September 9, 2011, the second round submissions should be submitted by September 23rd, and so on. High-level summaries of the expressions of interest will be posted on this website with no attribution or identification made.

Please include the following information in any white paper submission:

• Name of organization
• Description of organization
• Contact information
• Potential contribution (in-kind and/or monetary)
• Vision for level and scope of participation within the US Ignite initiative

Thank you for your interest in US Ignite!

¹At a minimum, such networks must support burst data rates of 100 Mb/s or more in both upstream and downstream directions to residences and businesses. The fastest service offers symmetric Gb/s (1000 Mb/s). The fastest widely available service in the U.S. (Verizon's FIOS) offers 35 Mb/s upstream and 150 Mb/s down in some locations.

About US Ignite

The US Ignite initiative aims to accelerate gigabit application development and use across the country by breaking a fundamental deadlock: there is insufficient investment in gigabit applications that can take advantage of advanced network infrastructure because such infrastructure is rare and dispersed. And conversely, there is little new investment in advanced broadband infrastructure because there are few advanced applications to justify it. US Ignite will break this deadlock by providing incentives for imagining, prototyping, and developing gigabit applications and by building out a pre-commercial high-bandwidth infrastructure on which people and organizations on campuses and in cities can innovate.

The primary goal of US Ignite is to create a national innovation ecosystem in which novel applications for advanced networks can flourish in a pre-commercial environment (e.g., through coordinated investments in network prototypes, research and experimentation, contests and competitions), but which ultimately will lead to a commercialization stage. Over time, we expect that compelling applications will be demonstrated that help justify private investment in tomorrow's infrastructure, and that the steadily-growing advanced infrastructure will spark a wave of novel application development.

To jumpstart gigabit application development across the US, novel applications in areas of national priority -- advanced manufacturing, clean energy and transportation, cyber learning, health IT, and public safety/emergency preparedness -- will be emphasized. Additionally, the federated, layer 2 connections will allow experimentation with alternative network architectures and protocols, methods of creating a secure network, at-scale application use, etc.

The plan is to stitch together advanced network infrastructure already available on many university campuses and in a growing number of far-sighted cities. Connecting these islands with high-capacity long-haul links could produce a single ultra high-capacity network that is larger in terms of both the number of subscribers and geographic size than anything currently available today. We expect a beneficial interchange between the innovation on the campuses and the social and economic development needs of the cities. Including universities among those with next-generation services can add disproportionate value to the introduction of novel applications as products, since university students and faculty often serve as both innovators and early adopters. A public-private partnership will be created to ignite the U.S. economy through more effective delivery of gigabit services to all Americans.