Cayey becomes first digital city in Puerto Rico - Caribbean Busness Online - 09/07/09

Digital-cities trend ensures public security, provides optimized services in healthcare, education and other fields Digitalizing and combining public services and infrastructure—an upward trend in recent years—results in enhanced education, safety efficiency, optimized public administration and financial development. Small cities and big metropolis in the U.S. and Latin America are reaping the benefits of these results. Governments in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Venezuela have created digital cities by combining broadband communications and service-oriented computing infrastructures to meet the needs of governments and their citizens. Locally, the municipality of Cayey became the first digital city by using bandwidth in its video-surveillance application. “Cayey is ready to extend this application to police patrol which, with a wireless connection, allows officers to monitor roads from inside a vehicle traveling at high speed,” said Fernando J. Quintero, regional business manager of Government & Public Safety for Motorola. Additional benefits of broadband technology in Cayey include the expansion of community services by providing free Internet access to all its citizens, capacity to provide automated services to address citizens’ needs, capacity to transmit live video from municipal vehicles and Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capacity to reduce telephone costs for city operations. Quintero believes public-private partnerships (PPPs) are the ideal way to digitalize municipalities. “This kind of partnership would free up the local government from focusing on technology. We offer to provide the service so the government can focus on public safety,” he said. [Open link for full story and updates.]