Thera Bradshaw, General Manager of the City of Los Angeles' Information Technology Agency (ITA)

Thera Bradshaw is the General Manager of the City of Los Angeles' Information Technology Agency (ITA).

She was recently appointed by Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn to the newly-formed Los Angeles Broadband Executive Panel (LA BEP), charged with examining "what role broadband technologies can play in accelerating economic development in the city and how Wi-Fi and 'next generation' wireless technologies can be used to retain and attract businesses to Los Angeles"

Establishing the LA BEP, Mayor Hahn said:

"I want Los Angeles to remain at the leading edge of innovation and creativity. We need wireless access to the Internet everywhere in the city—not just in select locations. I believe that Wi-Fi and 'next generation' technologies will help us bridge the digital divide."

Figuring out exactly how to do that will be job undertaken by Ms. Bradshaw and a distinguished group of academics and business people from various segments of the Los Angeles wireless community and from the telecom industry and the Los Angeles city government itself.

In the fifth of a series of interviews to be conducted with these busy, hyper-competent, and practical visionaries, Unwired LA spoke today for twelve and a half minutes with Thera Bradshaw about the Mayor's Broadband Executive Panel and the task it will now address: unwiring LA.

In that interview, Ms. Bradshaw talks about the unwiring LA project as part of Mayor James Hahn's vision for the City; talks about "public-facing" and internal uses of metro wireless networks; comments on the size and diversity of the City of Los Angeles ("a microcosm of the world"); mentions how unwiring LA fits in with the increasingly "mobile and global" nature of the world today; refers to specific trials of city-enabled wireless deployments at the Braude Center in Van Nuys, Pershing Square in Downtown LA, and Little Tokyo; talks about the BEP's responsibility for making policy recommendations about the economic arrangements for an unwired LA, including an option to provide free service to all on the model of public streets paid for by city taxpayers and made available for free to all ("information boulevards") and other, public-private partnerships; the importance of no person or area in the city being left behind in terms of broadband wireless access; and the possible impact of a city-wide universal, ubiquitous broadband wireless access network on the future of the cable companies and telecom carriers now providing most of the video programming, Internet access, and telephone service in the City of Los Angeles as voice-over-IP (VoIP) and server-based video distribution technology provide strong competitive challenges to these legacy systems.

You can hear this interview with Thera Bradshaw by clicking here.