The Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) program has expanded well beyond its original network of cities, bringing in new community members, funding partners, and allies across the public and private sector. Thanks to the National Science Foundation and to our corporate partners for their continued support. Hear what our colleagues and cities say about how the SCG program continues to grow. [embed]h…

Thank you to National Science Foundation and all of our partners for a very successful 2019 Application Summit, and for helping us determine every day how to make our cities and connected communities ever smarter. [embed]https://youtu.be/d-UjBaG-ySI[/embed] Notable Quotes “US Ignite tackles the challenges that our cities and communities are facing, bringing together technology and peopl…

The city of Cary, North Carolina created a test lab on its municipal campus back in 2017 with the goal of testing out smart city technologies before full-scale deployment. The city has trialed smart parking, connected streetlights, and even a new pest control solution. Along the way, Cary CIO Nicole Raimundo says the city has learned a few things. “We learned everybody loves a dashboard, righ…

Congratulations to our Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) partner, Eugene-Springfield in Lane County, Oregon, and the Technology Association of Oregon (TAO) on launching Speed Up America, a new speed test tool designed to provide real-world data on consumer Internet service. How does the testing tool work? Speed Up America uses open source software and the M-Lab test platform to collect Internet s…

Many people know how their cars rate in miles per gallon of gasoline. But buildings in a city? There’s no equivalent public standard for measuring the energy efficiency of city structures. That’s unfortunate, because at least according to a 2018 report for New York City, buildings are responsible for nearly 70% of greenhouse gas emissions. Clean up building emissions, and you can significan…

Municipal focus on resiliency – the ability to recover from a crisis or other difficult situation – is growing as communities contend with climate change, cyberattacks, aging infrastructure, and more. It’s been five years since San Francisco hired the world’s first Chief Resilience Officer, and since that time, at least 80 cities have followed suit. During DC Infrastructure Week, Chris …

We collect and distill a lot of information from our US Ignite Forum workshops, and we know it can be difficult to digest all at once. In addition to our topic-based playbooks available online, we’re now producing content spotlights to highlight the insights we think are most valuable. From our Smart City Connectivity Forum event in Dallas, here is our spotlight on Creating a Layered Investme…

Nearly doubling its funding from previous rounds, the National Science Foundation is expected to award $43 million to Smart and Connected Community (S&CC) projects in the new NSF Solicitation 19-564. Teams can apply for integrative research grants, or – new this year – one-year planning grants intended to fund the capacity building necessary to prepare project teams for future S&CC gra…

State regulations and regulatory mandates out of the FCC now govern how local governments can – and can’t – collaborate with wireless carriers on small cell deployments that are critical to the buildout of new 5G networks. Many cities aren’t thrilled with the legal constraints, but they’re nonetheless finding ways to move forward productively. In particular, three cities recently disc…

US Ignite is pleased to announce Vaughan, Canada is joining the Smart Gigabit Community Club.  Vaughan is just north of Toronto and is the 17th-largest city in Canada by population; it was Canada’s fastest growing between 1996 and 2006.  With the announcement of Vaughan joining the US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities (SGC) program, there are now two communities outside the United States (the o…

Nothing stays the same forever, and we want to formally thank Bob Metcalfe, founding member of the US Ignite Board of Directors, for his seven years of tireless service before he heads off on a well-deserved sabbatical. Bob – who is also professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at UT Austin, the inventor of Ethernet, and founder of 3Com – is leaving the US Ignite Board after helping to …

The 2019 Summit is over, but as we collect our notes on lessons learned and the people we’ve met, this is a good time to roll back the digital footage and show off some of our favorite moments from the event. [gallery size="large" columns="2" ids="2800,2804,2801,2807,2803,2802,2816,2806,2805,2809"]

We were pleased to announce earlier this week that we are welcoming Spectrum (the Charter Communications brand for its advanced broadband services business) into the US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities program. Spectrum has selected to work with St. Petersburg, Florida in partnership with both US Ignite and the St. Petersburg Innovation District. To kick off that partnership, the company hosted…

The US Ignite team is gearing up for our App Summit 2019 with a great program in store. Events start in Denver on April 1st with the US Ignite Forum workshop on Smart City Sustainability, and continue through April 4th with presentations, demos, panels, and breakout sessions. Once again we’re collocated with the Smart Cities Connect Conference & Expo. Sprint’s SVP of IoT Ivo Rook speaks …

When you put a group of community leaders together at a table to talk about the practicalities of building a smart city, you get a flood of information, some effective group therapy, and a lot of good ideas. That’s what happened during a roundtable workshop facilitated by US Ignite Director of Communications Mari Silbey at the recent CityLaunch event hosted by the Connected Communities Collabor…

After nearly a year of painstaking planning and design, the POWDER team is now gaining rapid momentum in their physical deployment of the POWDER wireless testbed in Salt Lake City, Utah. But what does the nitty gritty of testbed deployment look like? Let us show you. There are several fixed endpoints being installed now throughout the testbed region, but before the installation process began…