Chicago is My Home

05
Feb

All Not Aboard the Information Railroad in Chicago

Author: Adam Fendelman, Category: Business

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CHICAGO – A primary reason why the CME Group is positioned to make multibillion-dollar offers for rival exchanges is because Chicago hosts arguably the most advanced Internet infrastructure on the planet.

In the futures industry where a tenth of a second advantage on a trade can mean everything, access to reliable and light-speed communication networks is crucial. While downtown Chicago Internet capabilities and connections are world class, businesses that reside in many neighborhoods operate on relative dial-up speeds and capabilities.

“It is assumed that access is universal in the city and state, but it is just not,” said Paul O’Connor who in December stepped down from his post as executive director of World Business Chicago. “There are huge parts of population centers in areas of wealth and business that are not served.”

O’Connor – who spent the last decade recruiting companies such as Boeing to Chicago – believes maintaining a robust Internet infrastructure is as essential to the city’s economic well-being as is access to non-stop commercial flights.

He equated pockets of the city currently cut off from advanced communication networks to towns that were similarly out of the loop a century and a half ago. O’Connor added: “If you were not along the line of the railroad, you were [out of luck] in your economic future.”

According to Joe Mambretti – director of the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University – the global economy will eventually revolve around the transmission of digital information. In order to remain competitive, companies in all areas from all industries must learn how to best manage the movement of information.

As the pipes that transmit information expand, the depth of the content and information that travel within them will also increase. Mambretti currently is working on a technology known as “4K” that allows for 4,000 pixels of horizontal media display.

For those of you scoring at home, this means a viewing reception four times as strong as high-definition television. Industrial applications for 4K technologies, though, will not be limited to entertainment and will include advancements in areas ranging from banking to automotive to computational nanotechnology.

“It is critical for Chicago’s future to have an infrastructure to support these services that are being adopted around the world,” said Mambretti, who also directs the not-for-profit Metropolitan Research & Education Network that focuses on creating an infrastructure to support the so-called next-generation Internet.

He added: “The policymakers have to become more sophisticated with their concepts. They are used to thinking about infrastructure as things that were great in a 19th century economy like bridges, trains and roads. They often ignore infrastructure necessary for a digital economy.”

By Brad Spirrison