Wired Wellington: The Info City Project and the City Link Network

As a central component of its Vision 2020 strategy, the city of Wellington, New Zealand has developed preliminary plans to transform itself into a wired city. The overarching project was called Info City. One of the sub-projects was called City Link. The objective of City Link was to create a high-speed digital communications infrastructure for the downtown business district. Fibre optic cable was to be used to wire up, simply and inexpensively, the city's downtown businesses, to provide a backbone network that businesses could utilize, however they wished, to make themselves more competitive. A consortium of interested parties had recently been formed, a telecommunications architecture was being developed, and plans for stringing cable were under way. While the project champion was unclear about the utility of the new system, he was confident that once the infrastructure was in place, ideas for its utilization would readily emerge. This case provides a setting for exploring the issue of the role of IT in competitive strategy. It also raises interesting social policy questions, about who should pay for such undertaking, who should benefit, and so forth.

• Competitiveness
• Information Technology
• E-Commerce
• Networks