Silicon Valley Considers Ways to Improve its Broadband Connectivity Issues

Leading San Francisco Bay Area employers -- including Apple, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Nortel, Oracle and Verizon Wireless -- plus the region's largest municipal governments, are slated to meet on Monday to discuss ways of improving the region's broadband situation.



These company and city leaders will discuss how to overcome current regional challenges to building a telecommunications system worthy of the region many consider the technology capital of the world. The meeting will be guided by a keynote presentation by Scott McNealy, Chairman and Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems, plus a report by the Bay Area Council, prepared by Bonocore Technology Partners, that reviews what other countries or regions have done to improve their infrastructure, and recommends Bay Area actions.



"The Bay Area's telecommunications infrastructure has not kept pace with that of other regions, such as Korea and Japan," said Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council. "Many of the next-generation technology companies require graphically-intense applications, like video, remote health-care, multi-media or even videoconferencing, and need ubiquitous and much higher broadband speeds. If we can't build a better telecommunications backbone in the Bay Area, these new companies will start somewhere else. We also risk losing our current clusters of technology companies, plus financial services and others, who are increasingly locating their operations at superior worldwide telecommunications hubs."http://www.bayareacouncil.org