It’s a movement built around embracing new technology to experiment, to improve life here, to stretch resources and do more — goals that have created a series of unlikely partnerships across local government, businesses, schools, the military and more. Together they’re turning downtown into a “Living Lab” full of smart technology that includes free, 1-gigabyte Wi-Fi, street cameras wired to a city network, a network of underground fiber and thousands of adjustable LED lights.
Each partner brings something different to the table, and each has different goals in mind. Companies and universities will get access to data faster and easier, and city leaders can monitor and control the environment like a smart home. “What we recognize is that we’re all really good at working together,” said Lora McClendon of the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce.
Much of it is happening out of sight. Commuters dig for quarters to feed outdated street meters before ducking into the 100-year-old Chris’ Hot Dogs near the Capitol while data traffic streams through the region’s busiest internet exchange inside a building across the street. That exchange was only set up three years ago, offering a high-speed commercial connecting point for data companies, cable providers, streaming services and others and now has 29 members. A similar exchange in Nashville, Tennessee, has five members.
“The industry guys are telling us we need to start going out further and get people between Dallas and here, and Nashville and here, and get them to come in here,” city IT director Lou Ialacci said.
One of its connections runs to a new Air Force innovation center a few blocks away called MGMWERX. Inside, private companies and entrepreneurs from across the nation pour over white boards and display screens to solve tech problems for the military. It’s now testing a mobile video game that teaches the basics of orbital dynamics and space travel.
That fiber was laid by Alabama Power, one of the partners in the project. It spent about six months last year digging up the streets of what’s now known as the innovation district to lay the infrastructure. The next phase will connect fiber from Riverwalk Stadium, to the state Capitol building, to the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Cottage Hill. Phase 3 would bring it to Maxwell Air Force Base and beyond.
“Everything we’re doing may not be in every part of the city,” TechMGM Executive Director Charisse Stokes said. “By us starting in this area, it allows us to (scale).
“No single area has everything that we have. You have to look at the differences and look at the assets that we have. That drives a lot of the decisions that are being made.”
Montgomery is a city of contrasts, one that built global infamy through the Jim Crow era and the fight for Civil Rights but is now home to mostly black residents. It’s heavily Christian, staunchly liberal, and bleeds red, white and blue. It’s synonymous with Alabama’s overwhelmingly conservative state government, but a landslide victory in Montgomery County sent Democrat Doug Jones to the Senate instead of Roy Moore.
It was a hub for internet predecessor Arpanet in the 1970s, it’s home to some of the military’s top tech missions today, and it’s also home to decades of generational poverty that has kept swaths of the city stuck in time. Until the mid-2000s, downtown was one of those places, full of abandoned buildings and empty streets.
Now, people from around the world fill the sidewalks along the innovation district each day while EJI buses shuttle tourists between sites. EJI didn’t plan to operate shuttles, but it didn’t have any choice because downtown’s infrastructure hadn’t advanced quickly enough to handle the crowds before they opened two national historic sites here. Now, it’s cheering on the plans to speed up the pace of progress.
“There’s a lot of untapped potential that our region offers people in all walks of life,” EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson said. “We’ve got a military base, we’ve got state government, we have this rich history, we have beautiful natural resources. We have a community of people who care about service and sharing. All of those elements are critical to create a thriving space. We just have to take advantage of that.”
The city is one of five across North America that won the Smart Cities Readiness Challenge earlier this year. That came with a grant for a year-long technology program, mentoring and digital tools. The Smart Cities Council, which awards the grant, praised the approach to building partnerships here.
Yet the city continues to struggle with perception, not just because of the regressive image created by its past but because of national outrage over contentious laws handed down from the Capitol at the top of the hill.
“Even in the private sector, when people come here they’ve already siloed the city up,” local network engineer Boyd Stephens said. “They’ll come here and try to make all that (military) money at Gunter (Annex), but in their mind they’re doing work with Gunter. They’re not really in Montgomery. They’ll come and try to take every contract Alabama has, but in their mind, they’re doing work with the state. You do know this is who we are, right?
“When that mindset changes, it changes the whole narrative in the Southeast.”
In the meantime, the partners involved with the project want to make sure the city is ready. McClendon said the creating a data-rich, high-speed environment will make it easier for people to bring in new ideas, or execute startup plans.
"If we fail, we’re going to fail forward," said Leslie Sanders, vice president of Alabama Power's Southern Division.
©2019 the Montgomery Advertiser (Montgomery, Ala.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
