Who Pays for Wireless Cities?
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Cities and towns are jumping on the Wi-Fi bandwagon. But a municipal model of connectivity may be tricky to pull off.
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MacCentral - The city of Philadelphia has reached an agreement with Verizon Communications Inc. that will let the municipal government deploy a citywide Wi-Fi network, but a carrier-backed bill that would let incumbent carriers block such projects has been signed into law by Pennsylvania's governor.
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InfoWorld - The U.S. government has given away between $140 billion and $480 billion worth of radio spectrum to wireless providers and broadcasters since 1993, according to a study released Tuesday.
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Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday.An earlier&#160;attempt by Google and EarthLink&#160;to offer&#160;free city-wide Wi-Fi access in San Francisco&#160;foundered in August when&#160;EarthLink pulled out. They had planned a two-tier service, with faster, paid access provided by EarthLink and a more limited, advertising-funded service to be offered by Google. The search engine giant is also an investor in Meraki.Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city, Free the Net, which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it began last March.To avoid the need for extensive cabling, Meraki will build the backbone of the network using a mesh network of solar-powered wireless repeaters installed on rooftops. The nodes will use some of their wireless capacity to offer Internet access to those nearby, and the rest to haul traffic back, via adjacent nodes, to the network&#39;s core.The company is looking for city residents willing to put a repeater on their roof. Those hosting a repeater will get free access to the service -- but so will their neighbors -- although for them, the signal may not be as strong. Although devices are shared, Meraki aims to deliver data rates of around 1Mbps&#160; to each user.Meraki will pay the cost of rolling out the service, and no public funds are involved, it said. Investors have offered the company an additional $20 million in venture capital to fund the move, it announced Friday.Ozone in Paris offers a similar wireless Internet service based on a network of wireless repeaters. Its service is only free for those who host repeaters, though: others must pay &#8364;18 ($26) a month.
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Pah - we sneer at your global economies of scale! More dismal news for the US consumer. After the simultaneous failure of Municipal Wi-Fi projects in three major US cities - something we predicted four years ago - faster, cheaper mobile data looks further away than ever.â¦
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Plans for municipal Wi-Fi in a dozen cities currently in negotiations with EarthLink may be in jeopardy as the company is imposing new demands on how the networks are to be paid for.
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Depending where you're roaming T-Mobile has cut by more than half charges for business customers who transmit data over its mobile networks in countries where it operates its own network.â¦
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Blog: With full leasing ownership of the 700MHz spectrum, Google will try to effectively cripple the cell phone industry.  Before you scoff and say this is a bunch of garbage, consider this: Google will only offer the $4.6 billion if the government agrees to th
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How cool would this be? Free WiFi for everyone in San Francisco. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom set a goal Thursday of providing free wireless Internet activity in his city.
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With a rash of muni Wi-Fi projects collapsing, companies and cities realize their initial approaches to providing ubiquitous, free network connectivity aren't working. The problem is Wi-Fi is too expensive to deploy, and there's not enough user demand.
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By DAVID B. CARUSO    PHILADELPHIA  -- For about $10 million, city officials believe they can turn all 135 square miles of Philadelphia into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot...
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Verizon's agreement with Philadelphia brings new life to the city's WiFi plans.
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Wi-Fi enabled phones, like the iPhone, will drive demand  for fast wireless broadband networks like the ones cities want to build using Wi-Fi.
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EarthLink's contract to build a municipal Wi-Fi network in San Francisco appears to be a victim of the company's financial struggle.
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Will launch a fixed wireless service in a 'major city' next year
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Prime real estate up for grabs Ofcom, the UK's the broadcast regulator, has tagged WiMAX mobile wireless as a likely source of revenue for the public purse.â¦
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Business models followed technology too closely A year ago, hardly a week went by without news of a major municipal wireless project in the US, supporting free or subsidized access and a host of shiny business models. Now hardly a week goes by without news of the death of one of these plans.â¦