Last night, the Intelligent Community Forum announced their top 21 Smart Communities:
- Arlington County, Virginia USA; population: 210,000
- Ballarat, Australia; population: 88,000
- Besancon, France; population: 122,000
- Bristol, Virginia, USA; population: 17,590
- Dakota County, Minnesota, USA; population: 398,500
- Danville, Virginia, USA; population: 42,000
- Dublin, Ohio, USA; population: 40,000
- Dundee, Scotland; population: 142,000
- Eindhoven, The Netherlands; population: 733,000
- Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia; population: 500,000
- Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada; population: 65,000
- Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; population: 1,148,000
- Porto Alegre, Brazil; population: 1,416,000
- Riverside, California, USA; population: 296,800
- Suwon, Korea; population: 52,000
- Tallinn, Estonia; population: 404,000
- Taoyuan County, Taiwan; population: 1,970,000
- Tel Aviv, Israel; population: 391,300
- Tianjin Binhai, China; population: 2,020,000
- Trikala, Greece; population 51,900
- Windsor, Ontario, Canada; population: 393,400
Virginia has 3 towns in the list; I’m waiting for the day that Minnesota has such a showing.
Danville’s nDanville fiber project has been in operation for two years, and was the first open access, open services network in the U.S. The network has been extremely popular with the medical community, and the local hospital has been delighted with its new ability to extend its network to medical offices and clinics in other parts of town. One large clinic has a 250 megabit connection to the hospital–something they had never been able to afford before nDanville. A $400 million dollar data center recently selected Danville because of the fiber network. They are moving into a shuttered textile plant. Network design and planning was done by Design Nine.
Thanks for the detail! I was just reading more good things about open access networks this weekend. The FCC found that lowest prices and highest speeds are almost always offered by firms in markets with open access networks. http://tinyurl.com/yj8vnk2 Danville is clearly one good example!