From Gigabit Testbeds to the “Game of Gigs”

Gig.U began in 2011 with three-dozen research university communities coming together to accelerate the deployment of next-generation broadband networks to enhance educational and economic development.

We believed that eliminating bandwidth as a constraint to innovation would lead to economic and social progress for our communities and accelerate the discoveries university communities create for the world. We also believed market forces by themselves would not deliver such networks on a timely basis and therefore, we ourselves had to innovate in how we approached network deployments.

We saw our task as creating test beds; what we were attempting to do -- organize communities to stimulate private investment to upgrade or overbuild existing networks -- had few precedents. This required openness to different models, some of which would hopefully succeed and some of which would likely fail.

Still, taken together, those efforts would draw a map that all communities could use to create the next wireline upgrade and achieve bandwidth abundance.