CSFN hosts municipal economic development workshop

CSFN Chairman of the Board and Park Forest Village Manager Tom Mick welcomes workshop participants at South Suburban College.

The Chicago Southland Fiber Network held a municipal economic development workshop on Aug. 26, 2015 at South Suburban College to help south suburban communities along I-57 take still another step towards becoming gigabit communities; creating digital equality; and utilizing CSFN’s recently installed broadband fiber infrastructure to attract companies. That’s because businesses of the future are going to be where the bandwidth is.

Read more about the CSFN, workshop or view the slides here. More photos are here.

The CSFN Network can provide ultra-high speed internet via a direct fiber connection at up to 10 gigabits per second…That’s 10 billion bits per second.

It’s important that municipal economic development staff know what resources are available and think about what can be done to leverage this state- and county-invested resource that belongs to the southland communities, organizers said.

“The $6 million grant-funded project aims to level the digital playing field in the region,” CSFN Board Chairman Tom Mick said. The group’s next major move is requesting federal grant funding to add video surveillance to CSFN.

Urban Communications CEO Ed Urban (708-381-5493 or CEO@URBANCOM.NET) and CSFN Executive Director Rusty Winchel (847-421-6231 RWINCHEL@CSFN.US) encouraged each community to contact them to discuss their unique needs. Those communities include Blue Island, Calumet Park, Country Club Hills, Dixmoor, Dolton, East Hazel Crest, Harvey, Hazel Crest, Homewood, Markham, Matteson, Monee, Oak Forest, Posen, Richton Park, Riverdale, South Holland, Tinley Park and University Park.

The Chicago-Southland Fiber Network is a not for profit corporation founded by the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association to support and own the assets of the Southland’s Fiber Optic Network.

Urbancom.net is a locally owned privately held company part of the Urbancom.net family of companies which has been providing broadband Internet, VoIP, wireless broadband, and IT services to the Chicago’s southern, southwestern, and western suburbs since 1997. Urbancom.net Fiber Operations Inc. has been tapped as the network operator of the Chicago-Southland Fiber Network. Urbancom.net has built a reputation to be the industry experts providing premium engineering and design for the region’s network needs.