Leaving aside the fact that what goes for ‘broadband’ in Europe in terms of bandwidth is nothing compared to what is widely available in South Korea, it does compliment the findings of the Study undertaken for infoDev and the the World Bank by the OPLAN Foundation, namely that the Netherlands is also in the vanguard of Open Public Local Aceess Network (OPLAN) developments.

The City of Eindhoven - home of the Philips company that gave the world cost-effective light bulbs - remains a shining light to the rest of the world - this time in terms of its vision for the information age and its determination to have an OPLAN to serve and benefit the community and to enhance its competitiveness as a place to live, work, relax or invest.

This strategic OPLAN vision for Eindhoven and how it is already being implemented over an extended period is set out in an engaging casestudy document “Eindhoven, leading in technology – On the fibre-optic networking of a city”. 

Co-authored by Robert Elbrink, Senior Policy Advisor with the City of Eindhoven and one of its advisors, Patrick van Eekeren of M&I Partners, is published in IT Management Select (Vol 11 No 3 2005).  Many a city that aspires to achieve the fashionable ‘e-city’ status could well take lessons from Eindhoven.  Indeed, Eindhoven already has ‘e-citizens’ in more than one neighbourhood benefiting from being connected to OnsNet  (‘our-net’) the initial phase of the ubiquitous OPLAN plan to connect everybuilding by 2010 with abundant bandwidth.

Couple this with the Brainport Eindhoven vision (complimenting Amsterdam with its Schiphol AIR-port and Rotterdam’s world class SEA-port), and Eindhoven is surely an exemplar city when it comes to preparing for the new information age in the developed world.

Download a descriptive note on Brainport Eindhoven.