Photo by Stephen Hosmer
Santa Cruz is a small town with huge reserves of talent. Out of the 58,000 souls that call our community home, we have expert programmers and designers like Joe Hewitt and Sol Lipman, visionary entrepreneurs like Doug Michels (SCO) and Philippe Kahn (Borland) and a veritable plethora of inventors and fabricators like Craig Calfee and Jack O’Neill.
What’s more, we have nearly 21,000 workers who drive over the hill to Silicon Valley everyday to build the routers, switches, software and services that will travel over Google’s fiber, no matter where it’s put in the ground.
Our greatest blessing, all this talent is also our greatest curse.
There’s a price to this commuting pattern “over the hill” to San Jose and Santa Clara. We add millions of pounds of carbon to the atmosphere and fray at the social fabric of our community. You can’t be a fully involved citizen, make PTA meetings or T-ball practice when you work 9 hours, and spend another 2.5 in the car each day on one of the most dangerous arteries in the Bay Area (Hwy 17). This fiber could change that.
Imagine a real distributed workforce where our technology can save the time eaten by those vehicle trips and keep them where they are truly needed: at the office, and congregating in our co-working spaces like NextSpace or the Satellite, or in smaller, flexible offices set up by our biggest employers like Cisco and, you guessed it, Google.
With this much bandwidth, all our research institutions, from UCSC, the Human Genome Project, Long Marine Lab, to USGS and NOAA can push more data from their climate modeling and bathymetry projects out to the global academic community. And using new control systems our astrophysicists and adaptive optics can share their tools and data sets from the furthest reach of observable space. They might even end up in Google Earth and Google Sky.
Our hospitals and health clinics, urban and rural could link up with research and teaching hospitals in the Bay and the globe, share records, explore telemedicine and assist others in need across the country.
Our first responders could link up with video and real time GIS data to confront emergencies like earthquakes, fires and storms.
These test cases are all well and good, but the real economic multiplier is in the efficiency that comes with such a dramatic increase in bandwidth.
Each packet passed between this fiber project and the wider internet will move faster. From point-of-sale to point-of-presence, efficiency will scale, resulting in increased output from the workforce.
Plus it means jobs. Like the Council of Economic Advisers says, ”output reflects increased employment: some comes from increases in hours of work among employed workers and some comes from higher productivity.”
Thanks for listening, hope we see you soon.
