Cisco lines up another Smart+Connected community

Northern Ohio looks to shake the rust off public services, government operations

Cisco has joined together with a non-profit broadband service provider to implement pilot programs designed to enhance the citizen quality of life and government operations in northern Ohio. Cisco is teaming with customer OneCommunity, a northern Ohio nonprofit service provider, to implement the programs, which are part of Cisco's Smart+Connected Communities initiative.   

The programs will focus on workforce retraining, public safety, access to healthcare, and public services. Northern Ohio, embedded in Northeast America's Rust Belt, includes the cities of Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown. These communities have seen decades of decline due to an economic history of heavy industry and manufacturing -- like autos and steel -- which were decimated by imports and/or companies moving offshore for cheaper operations. 

The region is attempting to transform its economy to one based more on services such as healthcare and education, and technology. These pilot programs are intended to support this with a digital communications infrastructure addressing citizen services and public safety. 

One such program is a "digital literacy" campaign launched by OneCommunity and a consortium of non-profits. They will conduct digital literacy training and technical support on job searches, access to health information and online government services to 30,000 low income households located in OneCommunity's free public WiFi cloud. 

For public safety, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, is harnessing OneCommunity unified communications services and 3,000 Cisco IP phones to assemble multidisciplinary emergency response teams. This is intended to coordinate responses between fire, police, medical, hazardous-materials and other first responders across the county.

The city of Akron is outfitting its police force with a wireless voice, data and video network that will allow squad cars responding to an event to access graphics or maps on the location of the incident and possible perpetrators. Video feeds will transmit suspects' pictures in real time, thereby reducing capture time. 

Akron is also using Cisco's collaboration technologies to deliver several community services. Akron citizens will be able to access incident reports from a Web-based portal that will allow a resident to locate a specific incident report by searching by name, address or date, and view it on the screen or download it in PDF format. The system will also send an e-mail report to a victim or witness if the police officer is provided with an e-mail address.

The city is also using an application that allows it to schedule community activities in more than 100 separate facilities. 

Healthcare education will be delivered to the region's school systems to promote disease prevention, and curb student absence due to illness. Select schools and colleges will have access to Cisco's TelePresence, HealthPresence and WebEx virtual meeting and collaboration technologies to remotely conduct physician interactions and classroom sessions.

Cisco is tapping an opportunity worth billions of dollars in Smart+Connected Communities.

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