When I read the news this morning about Cisco’s plan “to network whole cities” …

Cisco Systems, the world’s biggest maker of data networking equipment, plans to launch a business group, based in Bangalore, India, that will wire new buildings and even entirely new cities with state-of-the-art networking technology … A city wired top-to-bottom with IP technology would be able to use it to manage infrastructure, such as traffic signals or surveillance cameras, while residents would be able to use it to access media content or control energy use in homes or office buildings, Cisco said.

… I couldn’t help but recall this passage about Thomas Edison in The Big Switch:

By the time he returned east in the fall [of 1878], he was consumed with the idea of supplying electricity over a network from a central generating station. His interest no longer lay in powering the drills of work crews in the wilderness, however. He wanted to illuminate entire cities.

Much of the discussion of the emerging new computing grid has been dominated by upstarts like Google and Amazon Web Services. We shouldn’t forget that there are other, very large and powerful businesses – Cisco, IBM, HP and the world’s big telecommunications carriers, to name a few – that have a big stake in the way the infrastructure of the new computing utility is deployed and used. Cisco’s move to network entire cities, illuminating them with optical fiber, gives a hint of the competitive battle on the horizon. 2008 will probably be the year when the big boys start to flex their muscles.