The Public Technology Institute (PTI) recently recognized the City of Santa Monica for its “Institutional Fiber Optic Network” entry at its 2005 Congress for Technology Leadership, an annual event that brings local government technology leaders and practitioners.
Santa Monica won the award in the small government, telecommunications and information technology category for its Institutional Fiber Optic Network (I-Net).
The I-Net connects 43 buildings in Santa Monica, including 24 City, 13 Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District, and six Santa Monica College facilities.
The City, school district and college share equipment, maintenance and operation costs of the network.
Each of the three used to maintain its own network to support voice, data, and video communications. Now they share a secure and redundant emergency communications loop connecting the three agencies. Costs for voice, data, and video communications have been significantly reduced while data rates have significantly increased. The I-Net has also eliminated the need for Wide Area Network servers, enables centralized Storage Area Networks, allows for server backups over the network, supports large data transfers, and provides the infrastructure to support future technology projects.
Santa Monica was one of several city and county governments cited in PTI’s 2004 Solutions Awards program. PTI is a national non-profit technology research and development organization charged with bringing the benefits of technology to local governments.
Entries were judged with other jurisdictions of similar size in the following technology categories: Energy, environment, public safety, telecommunications and information technology, and transportation. A panel of judges from local government associations and industry selected the winning entries.According to Dr. Alan R. Shark, Executive Director of PTI, “The local governments cited in this year’s Solutions Awards competition exemplify the creativity and technology innovation of local governments and how their application and wise use of technology has produced results. PTI congratulates all the cities and counties that entered the competition and we are pleased to recognize those governments that received awards.”
