WATERLOO — City and rural governments across southwestern Ontario are organizing to bring ultra high-speed Internet to 300 communities, making the web at least 100 times faster than the best service currently available for about three million people.

This development bubbled to the surface at a conference Thursday called CityAge: The Innovation City, which continues Friday at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Marcus Doran, an Internet entrepreneur, told the panel fibre-optic broadband is just as critical for innovation as any other municipal service, but nobody has taken on responsibility for providing it.

"Is there an opportunity to change that?" Doran said.

The answer is apparently "yes."

Fibre-optic broadband will download about 1.2 gigabytes a second. It is hugely important for Internet entrepreneurs.

Mike Murray, the chief administrative officer at the Region of Waterloo, was among the panellists Thursday and spoke about it in general terms while on stage.

But in an interview later, Murray said top administrators for the municipal governments in this region discussed the issue earlier this week, and they have yet to brief elected officials on contacts with a group called South West Integrated Fibre Technology. More talks with the group will occur next week.

"We are looking forward to engaging in those discussions," Murray said.

That group, representing municipalities, education institutions and the public sector, is applying for federal and provincial funds to pay for the high-capacity network, but it needs every municipal government in southwestern Ontario to help pay for it, or the upper levels of government will not provide funds.

Murray said discussions are at a very early stage, and it's not known how much money is expected from the municipalities involved.

Don MacKay, the warden of Oxford Country, said the 14 counties in southwestern Ontario need the support of the cities and the Region of Waterloo in order to get the funding to build the broadband network.

MacKay said that network is the Number 1 need for the future economy in this part of the province.

"Many local councillors, they say: 'We need funding for the bridge, or our road,'" McKay said. "And I am suggesting strongly we won't need the road if we don't have a vibrant economy."

The feasibility study is done, McKay said, and funding applications to upper levels of government are nearly complete.

"We are asking the administrations to put it into their budgets for 2015," McKay said. "We need that now because we are in our final stages of making our federal applications."

There are very few fibre-optic broadband networks around. There is one along the Toronto waterfront. There is one being rolled out in eastern Ontario.

In the U.S., Google has a division called Google Fiber, which is bringing fibre-optic broadband to Austin, Texas, Provo, Utah, and Kansas City.

Yaiway Yeh, the chief innovation officer for the City of Nashville, and a former mayor of Palo Alto, Calif., said fibre-optic broadband is to the 21st century economy, what electricity was to the early 20th century.

"This is akin to electricity, this is akin to water, this is akin to so many basic services," Yeh, a panellist at CityAge, said in an interview.

He is supported by John Jung, the chief executive officer at Canada's Technology Triangle, who said: "You need to have the essential service of high-speed broadband, and unfortunately Canada has fallen very far behind."

Doran, the Internet entrepreneur, is a research associate at the University of Waterloo, and his group is about to commercialize the technology it has developed. The team's web-mapping technology helps real estate developers get access to land-use data.

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"We are dealing with trying to display rich maps, trying to layer on many data sets to a single map," Doran said. "So speed of rendering, speed of download are relevant to what we are working on."

Building out this telecommunications infrastructure should be on the agenda, and should be under discussion now to keep this region competitive, Doran said.

"This region should be one of the places leading on this, as opposed to playing catch-up," he said.