Reflecting the trend toward an intelligent city, the city government of Kaohsiung in Taiwan has been undergoing a series of measures for carrying out its U-City plans. The city government has been totally devoted to the integration of ICT and future urban development, focusing on the making of the city into a “ubiquitous network society,” in which the expansion of fiber broadband networking plays a pivotal role in the entire urban development program.
According to the city’s urban development bureau, fiber networking infrastructure is the key to the future development of an intelligent city. Therefore, the city intends to draws on it as a vital resource to set up a sound foundation for a complete transformation from a highly polluted industrial city to a modern green city with all ICT-ready facilities in place. Using the Internet to boost economic power is becoming a wider trend in that the competitive edge of a city depends on the level of its informationization. Besides, because of abnormal climate change, Kaohsiung has suffered several major natural disasters in both maintain and downtown areas in the past years. Emergency notification systems became more and more important than past, but these systems all depend on the information establishment capable of alerting residents in no time when a natural calamity occurs.
Against the above backdrop, the fiber broadband network is now considered a front-line issue in the ICT policy. Currently, through administrative procedures, the city government is actively promoting a campaign calling for setting up fiber infrastructure in newly constructed projects where the FBB emblem is granted and at the same time is planning to offer incentives to constructors for gaining access to fiber technologies for the city’s economic and trade parks.
Since 2010, the bureau, under the principles of urban plan screening, has asked constructors to be environmentally friendly in design when they apply for an increase of the floor area ratio in cases involving floor space transfer, open space, or parking space. Of the designs, fiber-related construction projects are categorized under the “technology application in intelligent life,” in which builders are encouraged to put forth constructive measures, such as FTTB and FTTH applications or rooms reserved for fiber lines, for an improvement to the quality of the living that makes it to be more intelligent.
The bureau says that since most constructors are highly conscious of the trend that fiber networks are gradually becoming basic equipment in housing units, more than scores of buildings, requested by the city government, have laid pipelines in advance and reserved specialized rooms for related facilities in future. It is hoped that while increasing year by year, in 2014 alone the number of fiber-equipped buildings will at least reach 150. In addition, since 2011, the city authorities have been in negotiation with the constructors for inclusion of related applied services apart from fiber hardware.
The city government has also held at least 13 special meetings to review a draft bill governing incentives to encourage investment in fiber facilities for new construction projects. Mentioning in the bill is the FBB emblem to be awarded by the Committee of Communications Industry Development (CCID) of the Ministry of Economic. Constructors, committees of building management, or service providers with service agreements or contracts on access to the fiber broadband are entitled to apply for the emblem. The city government, in cooperation of constructors, has established a number of buildings as demonstration sites for fiber applications to promote the I-image of Kaohsiung in hope of attracting more people to come to the city for residence and work.
