The Meeting
The meeting I attended was on March 9, 2023. The meeting was held over zoom with an in-person conference room.
What was the point of the meeting?
I attended a city council meeting on March 9, 2023. The meeting I attended was about current project that are ongoing in Bloomington regarding fiber optic and free wireless. This was done over zoom and in attendance was a small group of varying careers. Many topics were discussed but the primary focus was on the fiber optic cabling that is currently being installed in Bloomington. This meeting covered multiple aspects that go into installing fiber optic cable including the positives and the negatives. It was a very interesting meeting to attend, and I was surprised by how much I learned by this small meeting.
Who was there?
There were not many people in attendance for this meeting, just a small group of people the directly relate to the topic. The IT director for Bloomington, Interim CEO of Hoosier Fiber Networks, an advisory board entrepreneur, network operations manager, and another IT professional were in attendance. This was a very qualified group of individuals that came together to talk about ongoing projects. There were other topics discussed before getting to the main topic that I feel is important to talk about.
Topics Discussed
The first thing discussed during the meeting was about installing free public WI-FI in parks around Bloomington. There were many parks mentioned and the some of them have been equipped with the WI-FI and some of them still are in the works. Another topic discussed was about setting up GIS portals on the city website. The next topic discussed was about a forum being setup up for public access to governmental forms. The group also talked about how they are working with the IU Data Center for an upcoming project.
After they touched on these smaller topics, they moved onto the main topic of the meeting. This is when the Interim CEO for Hoosier Fiber Networks began talking about the work that is being done about running fiber optic cabling through Bloomington. He stated that 15,000 feet of cabling is being placed down throughout Bloomington to get fiber optic connections. He also talked about drilling on 10th street and homes around campus that will be able to benefit from the fiber optic cabling being installed. Being the interim CEO, he did not have all the answers, but was very optimistic about what the company is doing. Unfortunately, there were no handouts given during the meeting, but he said that the company is in the works of creating a dashboard that will contain all the information about what the company is doing, so I hope to see that in the future.
When speaking on these topics, it is easy to say one thing, but the implementation could be much more difficult. These concerns were discussed in the next part of the meeting and some good points were made during this part. Many things could be said about every topic discussed, but I have chosen to talk about two projects that were discussed.
The Concerns & Potential Solutions
The next part of the meeting covered some problems and concerns that have arose during these projects. The first problem relates to the public WI-FI project, specifically the security issues that could arise with these parks having public networking. These were just common concerns that were brought up and they talked very briefly about the security concerns. This is important to think about when you increase the number of people that are being given access to a service. We are given free WI-FI on Bloomington campus, but we are required to login, making it a secure service. These public park access points will not require a login and are less secure. The service will need to have ample security to combat these concerns and will need to make sure that it secure.
The next problem that was brought up was concerned the fiber optic cabling. The issue was that these fiber optic cables would have to be wired going through private property. This brings up multiple issues about having to reroute the cable or getting permission from the property owner to run the cable through their property. I think that fiber optic cabling is important because it increases the speed greatly and will make connections more reliable, but there could be alternatives that would bypass the concern of private property. Bloomington campus uses access points throughout the campus to extend the area that people can connect to the service. They use this all over campus, making it seamless to go from one place to the other without losing connection. I think that as wireless technology becomes more advanced we could switch to access points being used city-wide. I think it would be interesting to see cities have a “City WI-FI” and you could be on opposites side of town and still be connected to the internet. This would bypass having to work around property concerns and would save a lot of labor that has to go to digging up the ground to run wires. This is theoretical but I think that it is possible with how fast technology is advancing.
Optimistic Conclusion
The meeting ended on a very positive note of optimism about the current ongoing projects. Learning about the various aspects of city government that are affected when a new technology is being implemented was very interesting. I am looking forward to seeing more information about the fiber optic cable being installed. As the meeting died down, they also talked about visits to the Luddy AI building and some of the projects that the students were working on, and the group was blown away by some of the things the students can do. These projects included AI being used to collect data to be used in different parts of the city. This was interesting to hear about and it was nice to see how excited they were about the students’ making projects that can directly affect Bloomington.
Image Sources
https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2016/may/the-abcs-of-free-public-wi-fi-la-parks-technology-innovators/
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/tech-takes/top-10-advantages-fiber-optic-internet-connections
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