Digital Cities: Houston Mayor White Speech

Mayor White opened with his personal background as a young computer programmer where he saw Bill Gates drop out (we know how that worked out) and he reminisced about the days of programming in Fortran...a while back.

When he was deputy secretary of DOE, Mayor White recalls DOE RFPs during the Cold War for Cray mainframes operating in parallel and the two (2) applications that required the most computing capability were weather and energy applications, like seismic forecasting, etc.

The message: Houston has a long history in IT, from those early days. On to the present, Houston has significant networking capability, but the addition of the wireless network will build on. The origin and driver for this initiative were the efforts of the Greater Houston Partnership, whose business leaders are looking out for the long-term economic health of the city.

Digital divide, economic development, and greater choice for users are key goals of this initiative. It's important that the city partner with private sector providers to accomplish its task. The GHP report in October led to a goal of an RFP process, where the city would be innovative and maintain a transparent process to build out a mesh network. Their draft RFP has been available for comments, out on the Internet, with the goal of public procurement to be one of transparency.

Continuing technology development will impact this process, probably to a greater extent than a wired system. Ongoing opportunities will be presented to upgrade the network during its deployment. Too often public entities, continued Mayor White, make a big deal about public announcements, but the mayor's goal is to get the network out there, not so much with fanfare as with a focus on business.

While small cities have been innovators in this space, large cities like Houston will offer the densities that will demonstrate economic success for these metropolitan broadband networks.

Houston is home to one of the greatest medcal centers in the world, home of the energy industry, and the aerospace industry -- all these industries are heavy consumers of IT, making Houston an important world center in IT application development. Finally, creating these new tools that support a more flexible workplace will address traffic congestion - a key issue in big cities like Houston.