The US Ignite partnership already includes almost
100 partners, from 25 U.S. cities to 60 national research universities to numerous leading telecom and tech companies, including Comcast, Cisco, HP and Juniper, which the White House says have signed on to offer “programming” support, to major wireless providers Verizon and Comcast, which will develop a high-speed broadband network in select pilot cities.
Meanwhile, other federal agencies including the National Science Foundation, the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Defense are all also participating in the program to various extents, with the NSF taking the lead in “committing $20 million to prototype and deploy new technologies” for the new high-speed broadband network.
NSF is also partnering with the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the Firefox web browser, on
Mozilla Ignite, a public competition with $500,000 in prize money that asks developers to come up with “apps from the future” that “can revolutionize healthcare, education, public safety, energy and more.” The competition begins today with an open call for idea submissions, which Mozilla says it will seed with development money separate from that of the prizes.
“Mozilla believes in the power of the open internet and the power of distributed, community-based innovation,” said Mozilla’s Executive Director, Mark Surman, in a
Mozilla blog post. “This is an invitation to designers, developers and civic thinkers to create software that shapes the future and helps their communities.”
The White House has not given a total cost estimate for how much money the government and private companies are collectively sinking into the US initiative, but the program doesn’t call for much new spending on its own, rather, it consolidates a number of formerly independent efforts by federal agencies and companies under one umbrella and under one goal: Prepare the country for an age when the Internet is way faster than what most users currently experience.