Full Transcipt:

Clifford Clarke: I am Clifford Clarke and I am the city’s Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer for the city of Fort Wayne. Often times the Mayor calls that the Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Transformational Officer.

Benjamin Higginbotham: oh, I like that!

Clifford Clarke: That’s a good one.

Benjamin Higginbotham: I didn’t have to mistake that one. I like the Innovation Officer, that’s totally mine now. What’s your role in the fiber and the bandwidth and all the cool bandwidth stuff you got going on here in the city?

Clifford Clarke: Let me talk a little bit. I am going to just change a little bit and talk about my role in general. It has two pieces. One internally, they insure obviously all of the standard infrastructure issues of the city. So the city’s servers, security, applications is on and so forth. But because of the Mayor Richard and his vision that’s where the Chief Innovation … Chief Transformational Officer role comes in, and that’s the kind of help get his vision out to the community of what we can be, and we have done quite a bit with that. So other than the fiber that we have in the available to our residence and to our businesses, we also have other topologies that we use quite a bit too, which includes cable, cable moulds and providing a pretty decent amount of speed, and also wireless solutions. In fact, our solution started with a wireless solution and then others became layered on top of that. Now the important part about that is there were able to take that topology and run all of these great programs, and that’s really what this Killer Application Conference is about.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Let’s talk about your wireless infrastructure for a moment. You said it started there. What started the wireless initiative to begin with?

Clifford Clarke: Back in about 2000, we had a RFP that put out to the masses to help us create a network, a community network that we are going to use primarily for public safety. And, Indiana Data Center was one of seven that answered that now you have the earth links in Philadelphia, and Seattle projects and steps like that. But we had done that a long while ago. That’s really was the genesis for our wireless network, who started with an RFP, Indiana Data Center won the RFP, it was very very innovative. It had a very low entry point from a $ perspective. We traded off which the lot of cities are doing now. Some are right away capabilities to help build out the network, and started from there.

Benjamin Higginbotham: From there you say you got the wireless that happened in Indiana Data Center IDC took care of it, and then where did you go? The fiber came in after that or the it was Comcast existing? How did that work out?

Clifford Clarke: Well, it’s kind of continue on that path a bit. When you have one solution, then other people say competition is good, we would like to get the piece of that pie so on and so forth. Obviously the technology has been changing, and obviously high bandwidth needs existed for larger companies and Fort Wayne has quite a few other larger companies in our area, and those guys were well taken care off. So really this whole movement was bargaining it to the masses. It wasn’t about getting it to the Fortune 100 companies or the Fortune 50 companies that were in our area, but it was bargaining it down to the masses, and because of that what we ended up doing is, we started with the Indiana Data Center, we started providing the broadband over wireless, very very effective in the clause, then others started to pop on including things like DSL, and also Comcast cable. So as the technology continued to move down the pipe more and more opportunities popped on because of the things that we were doing.

Benjamin Higginbotham: Was Verizon existing over, where there you ILAC  before they started to point fiber, how do that whole thing, that whole relationship?

Clifford Clarke: Coming out the 90s, there were a lot of …. And then actually allow the fiber in the ground from a business class fiber, it’s in the ground is owned by a variety of different, but Verizon is by far the largest in our community. But there are other players, other owners of fiber that are in our community, some of them who have folded and consolidated and sold off and things of that nature, but Verizon is the biggest player in our market.

Benjamin Higginbotham: So we have talked a lot today in this past week about the fiber optics and the ground and the bandwidth, and everything else. And a little bit about the Wifi board. What other technology initiatives you have going on in this city?

Clifford Clarke: We are doing a big infrastructure change over we realize that not only on the outside of being wired and inspired, which is the Mayor talks about quite a bit. But, we need to be just as wired and inspired on the inside of our building. So, I would say that our city has been the benefactor of the Mayor’s vision, but the city county, buildings and the city infrastructure is still a little bit slow on the update. And, what I mean by that, we still have a lot of leading edge stuff that’s out there. So, we have mobile data terminals, the video teleconferencing and those sizes of things. But we see that exploding, and we need to be able to be there. So, we are changing over our network infrastructure to take more advantage of IP technology, more quality of service, video on demand and things of that nature. We have taken a lot of opportunities that we use to have inline where citizen would come to the city county building to do work with the city inline, and turned it to being online, so that they can just go to a computer and get the things done, and we need to keep moving that along face by face and pushing it in the envelope.

Benjamin Higginbotham: What’s the reaction of the community as a whole to this wired and inspired vision, has it been push back … have they basically said Yes, that’s exactly what we should do from the beginning all the way out through now?

Clifford Clarke: I think that the wired and inspired vision as a whole has been well accepted by the community. They want more. They really want more and like any community, obviously the big dilemma for any providers, any entities as how do you do the balancing act right, I want more and more and more for less, less, less. And, it just doesn’t happen over night as something that we always have to work on. I can tell you that our businesses in Fort Wayne want more pipe because they can see what they can do with the pipe, and then they want that and they also want the price to come down, and come down further and faster, and that’s the balancing act that we were dealing with.