A Region on the Go--but Not at Fiber-Optic Speed
Los Angeles will host a Cyberplace: Cities of the Future conference Dec. 10 and 11 at which initiatives to help small business through expanded Internet access will be discussed.
This week the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership held a conference of 88 local cities to discuss ways to collaborate for growth of all the region’s communities.
And last week the Southern California Assn. of Governments held a conference of 170 cities from five counties to discuss economic opportunities.
If talk were dollars, Southern California would be rich indeed.
But there was only hesitant optimism at the conferences held in recent days. Speakers proclaimed Southern California’s economic recovery, to be sure, and listed the region’s undoubted assets--expanding foreign trade, the thriving entertainment industry, abundant high technology.
Yet talk turned quickly to problems--education, fragmentation. Participants at the NLAMP parley sneered at New York’s claims to leadership in entertainment and technology. But the sneering only confirmed that New York has chutzpah--this is news?--and Los Angeles, like Rodney Dangerfield, has a complex because it gets no respect.
This region often questions its own strength and regrets its own landscape. At the SCAG conference, economist Anil Puri of Cal State Fullerton asked: “What is needed to give a sense of unity and purpose to this vast region?”
A vision is needed that identifies Southern California as a major world center for the information age. The technology and the people are here--more than 200,000 working in multimedia. Yet the area’s prowess is not recognized. San Francisco, with far less industry, gets credit for Multimedia Gulch; New York’s mayor changes a few zoning laws, old buildings are outfitted with fiber-optic cable and the place becomes Silicon Alley.
Clearly, Los Angeles and Southern California need to get a vision and a catchy nickname to go with it.
Both could be supplied at the upcoming Cities of the Future conference, organized by the San Diego-based Foundation for Smart Communities along with Los Angeles city government’s Information Technology Agency and a Media Roundtable of leading entrepreneurs.
The aim is to spur development of high-capacity, fiber-optic communications lines that would be linked regionally and accessible to small businesses as well as large, poor communities as well as rich.
The advantage of such lines is that they allow vast amounts of information to move quickly--lengthy legal briefs, a day’s film rushes, trading data for finance houses, or simply continuous contact with customers or public access to city services.
Fiber-optic lines are ideal for the Internet links that big companies maintain these days with employees, customers and suppliers. And there are many such networks in the region. Movie studios lease them from Pacific Bell and GTE.
But small businesses often find the costs of special telephone lines prohibitive. And the bigger problem is one of ignorance. Most small companies don’t know what enhanced communications could do for business. And Los Angeles’ Information Technology Agency has been slow to come up with a plan for the city.
Other communities have moved ahead with innovations, however, and in their stories we can see the information economy’s possibilities.
In Anaheim the city-owned electric utility was upgrading its telecommunications lines five years ago and decided to install extra fiber-optic cables. Then it chose SpectraNet International of San Diego to market the communications capacity of those cables to other companies.
The experiment was launched this year and has already been successful, says Ed Aghjayan, Anaheim’s utility general manager. “MedPartners relocated 300 jobs to our city because of the expanded communications we offered,” he says.
Elsewhere in Orange County, the Segerstrom Group demanded that telecommunications suppliers install fiber-optic lines in South Coast Plaza and nearby areas in Costa Mesa. Four newcomers to local telephone service--MFS/WorldCom, ICG Communications, Nextlink and MCI Metro--won the bidding and have given central Costa Mesa sophisticated telecom capabilities.
UC Irvine and Irvine Co. use a fiber-optic network to serve start-up companies in their area.
San Diego’s city government linked fiber-optic lines installed by five telecom companies to give the city’s government agencies, schools, libraries and public services a sophisticated system of public access. The San Diego system also links the area’s businesses and universities.
“Those are early examples of an industry in its infancy,” says Howard Lefkowitz, vice president of Earthlink Network, the Pasadena-based Internet service provider. “Yet adaptation of this technology is moving so fast that any company not doing business on the Internet within three years will be toast.”
Indeed, there are ambitious ideas making the rounds of state offices in Sacramento. One is to create enterprise zones at universities so that their fiber-optic networks can support entrepreneurial businesses. Tax breaks would be offered to help create an infrastructure for the new age, comparable to the highway system for the previous industrial era. Heady ideas are in the air.
Yet Los Angeles is moving slowly. ICG Communications, a Denver-based company with offices in Irvine, has offered $17 million to lease spare fiber-optic lines from the Department of Water and Power. But the city’s Information Technology office has put a moratorium on any such moves while it ponders its own strategy.
Frustration is mounting. “We need to take advantage of the assets we have in this city, the DWP fiber lines among them,” says Los Angeles Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas, who is heading the city’s communications effort.
Which is why the December Cyberplace conference could come up with more than talk to help small business.
