The Forever Geek site posted this information recently about the efforts that will be done to rebuild the city after Hurrican Katrina.
The information they quoted below was originally from a USA Today article:
Assuming New Orleans rises again, a city rebuilt from the ground up could boast the best voice, data and video communications infrastructure in the nation, says Bill Smith, BellSouth’s chief technology officer.
If BellSouth does decide to rebuild its network, it could be “a golden opportunity for the city,” says Forrester Research analyst Lisa Pierce.
Wired with a state-of-the-art broadband network, she says, New Orleans could make vast improvements to health care, education and the local emergency communications network.
Emergency communications between the local and state governments, criticized in the aftermath of Katrina, could finally be standardized using the same type of network technology, she says.
To turn New Orleans into a state-of-the-art showcase, BellSouth would have to replace its 120-year-old copper phone wire with sleek fiber-optic lines that have far more capacity. Fiber offers mind-bending speeds on the Internet ? 100 megabits per second or more. Copper delivers a fraction of that.
That’s a pretty interesting thought. The article goes on to say that the only big challenge will of course be money. Seems BellSouth will check the existing infrastructure and if it can more easily (cheaply) be repaired then they’ll do that. I would think though that if they took advantage of this opportunity to build a 21century city from scratch, there would be many other cities that would look at what could be done and begin discussions on upgrading their entire infrastructure, therefore sealing more deals for BellSouth and other telecom companies.
Imagine being the current Christopher Columbus, landing in a new country (I’ll challenge the thought of “discovering” it and “claiming” it as theirs) and building a whole new civilization. What would it look like? Efficiently built and expandable central service utilities: water, electric, phone, data, transportation.