Currently, retirement centers fulltime buses every weekday to transport residents to local doctors and hospitals for routine checkups. With this style telemedicine booths, healthcare for retirees could be a lot less difficult for patients.

Similarly, for certain cases that normally require frequent visits to the doctor like OB pre-natal care, diabetes, etc, many visits could be handled with patient who is at home, via a simple video conference.

One use for the gig-to-the-home network would be to facilitate videoconferencing and work-at-home environments. The President of UF, Dr. Bernie Machen recently approved a "Green IT" plan for videoconferencing, see the Plan for Sustainability and Savings, along with some other documents discussing the plan.

Daniel H Cromer Jr.,
Associate Director Information and Communication Services,Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), University of Florida

A local company located in Gainesville has the design for a Home Healthcare Monitoring bed. This low cost medical bed is equipped with several devices and capabilities. The mattress is monitored by RFID sensors to record the vital signs of the patient (temperature, movement, wetness, and other biologicals). The bed is also equipped pressure sensor monitors to determine if the patient is out of the bed for a designated amount of time. There are cameras to record one way and two way conversations and video. The bed is also equipped with a keyboard and a computer to connect to the Internet. The sensors connected to the bed monitor video for surveillance, security, and other environmental conditions.

This bed produces a great deal of data that is needed to monitor and communicate outside the home and the local area. GigaBit bandwidth would enable a full array of services and reduce time for any emergency situations. A gigabit network would help to begin to deliver on the Internet's potential and promise of an "Always On" Information Appliance.

Ron Crisman PHD and founder of BSSI Medical Products

Smaller businesses generally use local CPA firms to assist with the preparation of their monthly, quarterly and annual reports. These businesses use products like QuickBooks or similar products. Generally the files created by the smaller companies are too large to upload directly to their CPA. As stop-gap alternatives many of these companies have to hand deliver disks, the CPA has to go to the location, or upload to the internet and then the CPA accesses the data and downloads this information. All of these approaches waste time, efficiency and compromise security.

A gigabit network would help our client complete their design of this application and assist QuickBooks and every other small business CPA.

Lorie Keegan, CPA, Manager, Carr, Riggs & Ingram, LLC, Gainesville, Florida

Alachua County Schools were the first in the nation to link all of its elementary, middle, and high schools to the internet. Gigabit fiber would allow it to provide faster access at its schools, and allow its students doing homework and projects at home to access more content-rich instructional materials.

Likewise, the University of Florida and Santa Fe College could provide more video-rich course content online.

Alachua County Schools, Gainesville, Florida

The utility industry is or will be completely reengineered as regulators and consumers alike pressure utility industry companies to change the way they monitor and report electric, gas and water consumption, for reasons including environmental and efficiency concerns.

The new monitoring systems will require integration with technology systems at the utility company and in the home, to enable better pricing models for the utility and better purchasing decisions for consumers. The meters will report their data automatically, delivering usage information to the utility via numerous communications channels.

Regardless of how these new “smart” meters work, all the new systems will create a tremendous amount of data, as millions of meters report their unique information at minute-by-minute intervals.

The data created may become so abundant and large that the utility company’s IT department’s concerns about managing gigabytes and terabytes may soon be replaced by fears of dealing with petabytes, a quadrillion bytes, or 1,000 terabytes. Adding to the difficulty, utilities will need systems for separating automated meter data for various determinations within the utility, like billing and pricing.

Advanced metering takes its place among the must-have technologies in the utilities planning; the coming data deluge will be like standing below a dam that’s about to breach.

Shands (owner of 13 hospitals in north Florida) and North Florida Regional Center major providers as Gainesville Radiology have large fiber transmission systems allowing them to send big computer files of CT scans and other complex images between physicians and other regional hospitals.

Smaller medical practices cannot afford the expense of high speed for fiber-optic cable and high-speed service allowing them to review images in real time. That includes hand held devices these doctors use when visiting their main hospital. The transmission and downloading of this data requires high speed transmission to be effective in real time. Nurses and doctors who specialize in home care could get access to complex images at a patient’s bedside.

There are many jails/prisons in/around Gainesville that could benefit from Face Recognition services. Also the police, at large, could tap into this system for faster, and more accurate assessment on their assignments.

Jan Huffstetler,
IT Expert, Database Administrator, Information Security Manager,
University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

The British Library has worked for more than 250 years to preserve the history and social culture for their published works. Now, as more information goes digital, those working to collect as much information as possible are beginning to worry about the “digital black hole.” So much information is created every day that older information is ultimately erased or lost, leaving generations to come with a potential void in their history.

“About 15 petabytes of information are created every day in the world,” said David Boloker, IBM’s CTO for emerging Internet technologies. A petabyte can be thought of as about eight times the amount of information held in all United States libraries today, he said.

Recent research by the British Library estimates the average life expectancy of a website to be just about 44–75 days, and it suggests that 10% of all U.K. websites are either lost by assimilation with other information or replaced by new data every six months.

For a public library purposes, the gigabit network only works if the patron has the same capacity at their end. We currently have thousand of downloadable materials and most people have an iPod or MP3 player. However, a lot of library users don’t have sufficient bandwidth at home to efficiently download the items.

The need (if not today then certainly within 12 -18 months) for a gigabit network is here especially as more live feeds (NCAA Tournament, NFL games, TV shows, etc.) become available. The next huge services will probably involve a high quality webcam and phone combination and HD or 3-D quality video on handheld devices.

Currently about 75% of home buyers access and use the internet to locate potential purchases. If real estate agents had access to a gigabit network, they could send blue prints, conceptual drawings, even HD video of properties to interested paerties. They could present this data across the US and locally between architects, builders, suppliers and others. Real estate agents, brokers and their prospective clients could make better, more informed decisions. GigaBit connectivity could also facilitate interaction with city and county governments, speeding up the inspection and planning process, for example.