The survey invited cities with populations of 30,000 or greater to participate, each of which were ranked with peer cities by population -- including a category for small cities (30,000-74,999), two for mid-sized cities (75,000-124,999 and 125,000-249,999), and one for large cities (250,000 or more).
This year, Des Moines, Iowa, took first place in the survey's 125,000-249,999 population category for the installation of a citywide network comprising 200 linear miles of fiber, more than 120 layer-3 switches and fiber connections to more than 60 city-owned facilities.
When your network suffers less than 27 minutes of unscheduled downtime during all of 2003, you're doing something right.
CIO Michael Armstrong traces Des Moines' success to several factors: the fact that the city owns its network, a bit of luck and a lot of work.
"It may be the most valuable asset we own," Armstrong said. "We control our own destiny. We can provide whatever bandwidth we feel like we need without having to go through some third party and dealing with that set of services. It lets you do so many things."
Des Moines' network carries all city data traffic and carries VoIP traffic to a substantial part of the city's work force in 25 facilities, Armstrong said. It also delivers video conferencing to all 12 of the city's fire stations, and city staff enjoy 100 Mbps connections from their desktops to network wiring closets.
"We don't have to worry about dealing with an application that has to have a thin client because we've only got a 64K frame relay link somewhere," he said. "We can run anything. That's an incredible advantage, and it lets us maintain the very strict standards we have. It eliminates the constraints of distance and bandwidth."
Des Moines also made its network available to Polk County, Armstrong said. Aside from carrying traffic for a number of county facilities, all three of the county's public safety answering points are connected to the city network.
Work on the back end of the city's network infrastructure started in 1998.
"It does take a long time, but if you do it right, you end up with a product that's very, very solid," Armstrong said. "The better you do at the fundamental things, at building that infrastructure, the more successful you're going to be. We've not really found anything we can't do because of some sort of physical limitation."
Information on other winners of the Center for Digital Government's Digital Counties Survey 2004 is available from Government Technology magazine.
