Fiber Optics - Powering the City of Tomorrow 

by Hotwire Communications

What will the city of the future be like? It’s hard to imagine at times. Fifty years ago, the greatest ideas were pictures through cartoons, like the Jetsons, that painted a world of flying cars and robotic housekeepers. It’s easy to see how these images inspired home automation and driverless vehicles. But if we want to get to that next step in our technology evolution, we have to start with the basics. A foundation on which to lay the groundwork for the automations of processes we can’t yet even begin to fathom, and that’s where fiber optics makes its mark.

According to a recent Pew Report, two-thirds of Americans own a computer and even more own a smartphone*. Currently, there are 1.3 million people moving into cities each week.** and as the population grows, so too does the need for connectivity. This is why cities across the globe are evolving into Smart Cities – urban areas with a combination of sensors, networks and social engagement technologies – to keep their residents connected and to work efficiently and lower costs. Live traffic updates and 4-way intersections with movement sensors are examples of how a city is becoming “Smart.” The best example of a Smart City is in Singapore. Juniper Research recently crowned it as the “smartest city on earth” with cameras installed across the city-state that can track everything from cleanliness to traffic. In order to keep up with the demand, Singapore announced that it would be implementing 10 Gbps of fiber broadband service across the island.***

Here at home, we have an example of how fiber optics is leading the charge. Avalon is the first “Fiberhood” in the state of Georgia. In other words, it’s one the first neighborhoods where they plan to make 1 Gbps Internet access available to every single home and business. As a community served by Hotwire Communications, Avalon has the ability to give its residents and business owners the bandwidth they need for today and tomorrow. Hotwire Communications can provide gigabit connectivity to each property with redundancy—or backup connection—and we have the ability to scale up to accommodate any community’s future bandwidth.

By installing a new fiber optics infrastructure into the streets and buildings of the city, driverless vehicles can operate freely, robotic drones can deliver packages, and hundreds upon thousands of mobile Internet users can catch the latest updates simultaneously, all without quality degradation, pixilation or

signal loss. Our team of industry professionals know exactly what it takes to design and install this type of network infrastructure and will help to maintain it for generations to come. Now is the time to lay the foundation that will power the possibilities of tomorrow.

Sources:

* Smartphone, computer or tablet? 36% of Americans own all three BY MONICA ANDERSON http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/25/device-ownership/

**The World In 2010: ICT Facts and Figures – ITU

***http://www.ioti.com/smart-cities/world-s-5-smartest-cities