The National Science Foundation has awarded $6 million to US Ignite—an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spur development of advanced Internet applications that enable transformative public benefit—for a project to develop “living lab” communities across the country. Participating cities will serve as testing grounds for smart gigabit applications. Announcement of the grant to US Ignite coincided with a press release from The White House highlighting the Obama Administration’s “Smart Cities” initiative.
The three-year US Ignite project will bring together researchers, community leaders, governments, entrepreneurs, and others in fifteen communities, including Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Research Associate Professor Jon Gant will be involved with this initiative via his role as a board member of Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B), an Internet service provider and fiber-optic broadband network. Gant is the director of the Center for Digital Inclusion at GSLIS.
“The timing of the US Ignite NSF grant is perfect for UC2B and our partner cities. As any of the gig fiber projects nationally will share, it takes time to build a new network from scratch. For UC2B, we built the network and connected community anchor institutions and low-income households in the first phase with federal funding through the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. We are now working through a public-private partnership with ITV-3 to expand service to the other 90% of our community. And it’s exciting that in parallel the University of Illinois, and the Urbana-Champaign private sector and high-tech community, now have funding through US Ignite to continue to broaden opportunities for new research, development, and community engagement to build next-generation applications focused on public benefit,” Gant said.
Gant is a national leader in the areas of digital inclusion and broadband adoption. He has published groundbreaking research in the areas of Internet access and use, including co-authoring the first report to examine broadband adoption among minority communities, which was published by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.