Scientific American (Feb. 18) -- In 2011 a group of universities and their surrounding municipalities formed the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project. The project’s goal is to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks in the U.S. by encouraging researchers to develop new applications and services that can make use of ultrafast data-transfer rates. Original players were able to be more ambitious, the best example being Illinois, which installed a fiber network across the entire city as part of their UC2B project.