San Diego Weds GIS, Fiber Optics to Woo Economic Development

SAN DIEGO -- When youve got more than 70,000 miles of fiber-optic cable in your urban area, you want people to know about it.

Simply talking about it is nice, but pictures tell a better tale. The citys downtown redevelopment agency, the Centre City Development Corporation (CCDC), the Downtown San Diego Partnership and city officials put their heads together and have rolled out a GIS application to paint that picture.

The GIS map, created by SanGIS, lays out the location of all fiber in the citys urban core and went online early December, said Dianah Neff, San Diegos CIO.

"It has the potential to be one of the best applications that were delivering," Neff said. "We need to get the word out that the fiber is there and how people can use it."

Creating the application was the easy part; collecting and aggregating the data proved to be more problematic, she said, adding that the telecommunications companies were leery, at first, of the data potentially leading to sabotage of their communications lines.

"Now, people are seeing the GIS application as a competitive advantage for them," she said, noting that businesses contemplating a location in San Diego can now see what buildings are wired, what streets are wired and what carriers are serving particular areas. "If youre a carrier thats not listed, theres a little bit of pressure to get your name listed there."

Neff said the GIS map will be extended to include the entire city -- currently, it focuses on the downtown area. That area has been dubbed "Bandwidth Bay" because of the amount of fiber and because of its proximity to the Pacific.

"Its a nickname just like Silicon Valley or any other area that has a high concentration of high-tech companies, and San Diego is trying to attract more and more of these companies into the urban core area where a lot of redevelopment activity is happening," said Derek Danziger, communications manager of the CCDC.

"We worked in a partnership with San Diego to create this fiber map because we identified [through previous economic-development discussions] that people were saying, If we move into this building, how do we know what providers are under the street or coming into our building?" Danziger explained.

The map will allow users to click on any sector of downtown San Diego to find out, among other things, what carriers are serving what streets; what management company is responsible for particular buildings; the vacancy rates of those buildings; the rents; and what providers service particular buildings.

Neff said the GIS map will be expanded in January to include screen-by-screen demos to help those unfamiliar with navigating GIS maps, adding that the site has already proven to be popular.

She said more than 1,000 people have visited the Bandwidth Bay Web site since the map was made public, although there arent any numbers as to how many people have actually accessed the map application.