The project, which is named Gig.U and will be announced on Wednesday, is meant to draw high-tech startups in fields like health care, energy and telecommunications to the areas near the universities, many of which are in the Midwest or outside of major cities. These zones would ideally function as hubs for building a new generation of faster computer networks, which could make the United States more competitive internationally.
For now the plan is a work in progress, with the universities reaching out to telecommunications companies for suggestions and to corporations and nonprofits for business ideas. The institutions involved include Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Howard University, Duke University, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington, the University of Chicago and George Mason University.
”We’re not asking for government money,” said Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute who is heading the project. “We believe the right approach is to have the private sector fund the networks.”
By offering one-gigabit network connections — fast enough to download high-definition movies in less than a minute — not just to scientific researchers and engineers but to the homes and businesses that surround universities, the group aims to create a digital ecosystem that will attract new companies, ideas and educational models.
“It’s a sandbox for the research community and the residents, too,” said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Case Western in Cleveland.
Last year, Case Western set up a pilot program in a several-block area near campus, he said. The Case Connection Zone offers one-gigabit fiber-optic networking to 104 homes adjacent to the university. Within three months of its birth, Mr. Gonick said, three startups moved to the neighborhood.
“We believe a small amount of investment can yield big returns for the American economy and our society,” he said.
The Gig.U members come mainly from the heartland — states like Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana and West Virginia — where they can potentially have a big impact on midsize communities across the country. The biggest universities already have access to higher-speed networks.
The colleges are preparing to talk to big telecommunications companies about ways to attract new ventures to their neighborhoods through super-fast computing. Then, they will seek out business proposals for building the networks, “not decades hence, but in the next several years,” the group said in a statement.
Although the United States pioneered computer networks from the 1960s through the ’90s, in recent years it has fallen behind other nations in deploying and improving network technology. A recent study by the World Economic Forum found that while the United States ranked fifth in overall network “readiness” — a broad index comparing countries in the digital era — it came in 30th in network bandwidth available to the population.
In 2010, before joining the Aspen Institute, a policy research group, Mr. Levin was the staff director of the Federal Communications Commission’s National Broadband Plan, which aims to make high-speed Internet service available throughout the United States. After leaving the agency and talking to researchers at universities around the country, he came to believe that the United States needed to find a strategy for continuously improving the quality of its Internet technology.
“It’s the difference between seeing it as a race-to-a-tape versus creating a constantly evolving ecosystem that is improving our networks,” Mr. Levin said.
The research community must still counter skepticism about what some technologists call a “build it and they will come” mentality. Some technologists say that once faster networks are deployed, new uses will emerge that cannot be foreseen today. Others argue that high-resolution video is the only current general application for the highest speed network technology.
“The concept is laudable, but the real question is for what purpose?” said Michael Kleeman, a computer network designer and telecommunications policy strategist at the University of California, San Diego.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 27, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a program run by Case Western. It is the Case Connection Zone, not the Case Connected Zone.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 28, 2011
An article and a picture caption on Wednesday about a plan to build ultrahigh-speed computer networks around American universities misstated the number of member institutions supporting the project, known as GigU. There are 29, not 28. (Project officials omitted George Mason University from a list of participating colleges.)
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