Cities Focus on Building Better Broadband
Gilbert relies heavily on its partnership with Cisco to power its broadband efforts, using Cisco routers, switches and firewalls. The town is seeking requests for proposals for the new fiber, and officials hope to start establishing fiber connections to homes and businesses by 2023. Several research organizations voted Gilbert the top U.S. city for remote workers, thanks to its embrace of hybrid offices and competitive salaries for workers based outside the office.
Wilson, N.C., has supported municipal broadband since 2008. Its Greenlight fiber-to-the-home network offers high-speed, reliable, affordable internet connectivity. The city initially pursued the effort because officials could not persuade existing providers to beef up their offerings to adequately support city services.
“One of our early realizations was that we simply did not have the network infrastructure available in the community that was sufficient for our own operations,” says Will Aycock, general manager for Greenlight. “I would have to drive around from office to office with data disks. As we were undertaking a project to install our own infrastructure, some of the major employers and institutions in the community started asking how they could get access to this fiber network.”