Mayor of Fredericton
Business Breakfast
November 23, 2000

I want to thank everyone for coming this morning. Today I am excited to speak with you about ways of working together to increase economic development for Fredericton.

In fact, Fredericton is on a bit of a roll. Last year, City Council authorized the purchase of a new Voice and Data Telecommunication system for the City. I am please to say that this state of the art system is now fully operational. This system was featured at a Telecommunication Symposium held in Fredericton earlier this week for professionals from the Atlantic Provinces.

Late last fall, you will recall we talked about Smart Communities. Greater Fredericton’s proposal was built on partnerships with our City’s strong business and Information Technology sector to showcase a vision of Fredericton as a Center of Excellence in the area of Information and Communication Technology. Our proposal was noted as a very strong submission and established us yet again as a Smart City.

City Council recognized the excellence of the proposal and instructed staff to pursue the projects by building on cooperation and partnerships throughout the public, private and educational sector.

As a result of our Smart Communities initiative, work with partners such as Caris/Universal Systems, LearnStream, BrunNet, UNB and a number of others has yielded impressive results.

And then there is NRC. Once again UNB, the business sector and the City came together to present Fredericton as THE site of choice to establish the NRC headquarters for an E-Commerce Research Center. We believe this is a very significant event for Fredericton. We believe this, along with Fredericton’s other many assets can be leveraged to create a virtual boon of economic development in our area.

We believe a significant contribution by the City of Fredericton was to highlight our vision of High Speed Communication Technology as an enabler for our community. In fact, the Federal Government has identified high-speed connectivity as a top priority over the next few years.

Today, I would like to announce a new project. In keeping with our commitment to NRC, City Council has authorized a 3 km ultra high speed link as a pilot. It will connect the Knowledge Park to UNB offering services to organizations along the way. For example this means that SmartForce will be connected to UNB and through them to a National broadband research network.

In addition, City Council has asked staff to prepare a business case for the development of a City-wide, municipally managed Ultra-High-Speed Community network. As a result of partnerships with UNB and the private sector, this fiber optic network will be capable of communication speeds over 100 times faster than currently available. It will initially serve to energize our community’s Research, Educational, Business, MUSH and Public sectors. This will clearly position Fredericton as "ready for business". Later this same network can be made available to the community at large. This is another example of enabling infrastructure, which will further contribute to our community’s strong partnerships in economic development for the area.

We have asked staff to bring forward a detailed business plan as soon as possible. Maurice Gallant, the City’s Manager, Information Technology is leading a team of staff working on this project. He will present the preliminary elements of this plan this morning.