Aussies and Kiwis sampling Dutch broadband (8)

Cisco was the host for the Australian and New Zealand Trade Mission in Amsterdam. And out of courtesy Cisco was put on the program to say something about the company. And I - thought that we were going to hear a lot about the boxes they sell. But the Cisco representative Mr Nicola Villa, director public sector; Internet Solutions Group of Cisco Systems International, had a surprising story.

He started from the broadband end. He distinguished three phase in the development of broadband:
- backbone focus with connectivity problems;
- access focus with upgrades to Fibre to the Home and wireless;
- content services focus with the scaling up of services.
Geographically phase 1 takes place in Catalunya (Spain), Italy and Greece. An exception to this situation in Italy is FastWeb in Milan, which offers access services to 0,5 million users: internet; soccer and sports; video surveillance. In the Netherlands we are moving from the access focus to content services. Stockholm (Sweden) has reached phase 3 and is working on financial sound, social and sustainable content services.

Presently Cisco finds itself in phase 3 and is developing content services and other services in the field of mobility, technology and environment. Cisco wants to use broadband to solve environmental problems. To that end Cisco has associated itself with the Clinton Global Initiative, connecting urban development with environment. One of the initiatives is the carbon to collaboration program. Cisco has set 20 million US dollar apart for 5 years to reduce carbon in the cities of Amsterdam, Seoul and Los Angeles. Cisco aims at reducing 60 percent of the carbon output it produces amongst others with travelling. For this reason it has developed its tele-presence solution, which eyes like you have all the people in the meeting on the same table. At the same time the company will invest 20 million US dollar in collaborative software to make tele-working more effective.

The idea of the program is to reduce energy consumption. Together with the municipality of Amsterdam an attempt will be made to empty six buildings by an integrated policy of nomadic working (working at home or at tele-presence centres, traffic management, using public transport, smart communities and new urban business. In Singapore every car has a RFID used for road charging, but also congestion. In Paris Public transport is using wifi to optimise the use of buses. And there are more green models under development, which move from a centralised to a distributed situation. Problem is often that governance is missing. Once projects in the Clinton Global Initiative are working, they will be copied to other cities.

Blog Posting Number: 699

Tags: broadband, environment, RFIDbroadband, environment, RFID