Smart Regions

The Djursland International Institute of Rural Wireless Broadband (DIIRWB) was created in order to pass on the experiences and knowledge acquired from building DjurslandS.net, a huge non-commercial wireless landscapenet run by rural people themselves. In a rural area of 300 km², the landscape is now covered by 300 overlapping radio nodes. Due to antenna amplification, each can be reached from settlements at distances up to 5 km.

Wad and Water is the title of a virtual learning environment for pupils of all levels from 10 years upwards. In order to acquaint the pupils with the unique flora and fauna along the North Sea Coast, it built an adventure game around the Dutch-German Waddensee. The interactive learning methods are innovative and also provide a cross-border learning environment between the Northeast of the Netherlands and Northwest Germany, the so-called "Ems Dollart Region".

Many people whose first language is not English or have problems reading could still benefit from information on the internet. There are text readers but these are still a bit impersonal. The newsfast services - funded from the Norfolk Open Link applications competition - gets over this problem by having a virtual character read news, weather and sport by taking these from RSS feeds and putting them into words and gestures. It is now being developed to support other languages for migrant worker communities. It is available on http://new.edp24.co.uk/content/videoconsole/Newscast.aspx .

Norfolk was one of the last areas in the UK to have its exchanges enabled for ADSL. However work had identified considerable demand for broadband from the Norwich area in particular as there are a high concentration of creative sector and knowledge companies. Norfolk Open Link is a £1.35m two-year pilot project to evaluate the impact that mobile technology could have on economic development in Norfolk and the delivery of public services. It provides a broadband wireless network covering a large area of Norwich City  centre and key locations in the rural district of South Norfolk.

The idea for the European Media and Broadband Center has been developed within the BIRD project. The aim is to support the learning process of students in the ICT and Media sector by working closely together with companies in these sectors. Students are confronted with ‘real-life’ tasks and have to come up with results in interdisciplinary teams. The companies have the opportunity to find the talents they need.

While large-scale enterprises have already completely transferred to broadband, local area networks and many small and medium sized enterprises often still have to catch up with developments. Rural areas in particular are not completely covered by broadband infrastructures. In our digital economy the absence of broadband internet means a significant location disadvantage which finally can lead to a decrease of business tax payers as well as a decrease in employment in the communes.

Access to the information society and economical development of the region depends considerably on the availability of broadband infrastructures. In cooperation with the government of Lower Saxony and "Metropolregion Bremen/Oldenburg im Nordwesten" the county of Osterholz founded a broadband competence centre. This project pursues several targets. First, locate "white spots"; second, analyze regional markets and find solutions for these regions by using alternative broadband technologies.

The availability of fast internet access (broadband) has become a decisive factor in the development of a region. Any Internet gap leads to a decline of the region involved since it makes living and working in the area less attractive (white spots). The broadband competence centre of Osterholz has developed an application based on the LoG-IN GII, which enables the county council to detect white spots, mainly based on two components (1, data collection, 2, planning and publishing). The data become geo-positioned and pooled into groups.

The County of Värmland today offers broadband access to the internet everywhere and to all citizens in the whole county of Värmland (geographical area). This is unique in Sweden and probably in Europe since it is the first region to ever actually achieve the vision that all people should have broadband access to the internet, allowing everyone to take an active part in the new IT society. The advanced CDMA450 network is based on the American 3G technology CDMA2000 and combined with the 450 MHz low frequency and provides a superior coverage in large rural areas.

Welgeleghen is an educational project, which would not be possible without broadband facilities. The target group is students in social work and social pedagogy aged 17-25 or older. It is based on the idea of interactive learning in pleasant surroundings, which is why this online tool is designed as a small town with a number of facilities. The tool serves as main site for our students: they can find general information about their subjects, find work placements, cases and tasks to solve, job offers from private or public companies, a library, the daily newspapers etc.