More cities and towns considering municipal wireless

16th August 2006

posted in edtech |

Muniwireless.com is a good website for people interested in ongoing, new and proposed municipal wireless Internet access projects. I learned on it that Google’s citywide Wi-Fi network in Mountain View, California is now online and available. According to another article about the project by Om Malik:

The network, which covers 11.5 square miles, features 380 access points, all supplied by Tropos Networks, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company. One in six access points is a gateway by Tel Aviv-based Alvarion. There are three bandwidth aggregation points in the network that are connected to GooglePlex using point-to-point gear from GigaBeam,
an equipment vendor based in Herndon, Virginia. The network was designed by Google engineers and installed by WFI, a San Diego-based network builder.

Municipal wireless projects are going to continue to be in the news. Progressive and forward-looking communities are and are going to seek partnerships between educational organizations, civic groups, businesses and local governments to provide wireless Internet access for residents and visitors. The numbers of restaurants, coffee shops, libraries and other spots offering free wireless access is increasing, but my perception is that municipal wireless initiatives are still pretty rare. Look for them to increase in number in the months and years ahead! The coverage map for Google’s Mountain View project is very impressive– I wish this same connectivity was available in my hometown!

On this day..

Geography 2.0: A Juicy Way to Mash Up Learning - 2008
Education, Learning and Media Megatrends - 2008
Ecto 3 Alpha released, not recommended - 2007
Real versus fake learning experiences - 2007
Great list of open source software tools - 2006
Great planet image - 2006
Provoking imaginations - 2006
More thoughts on "deregulating education" - 2005
Legal Guide for Bloggers - 2005
University news embracing podcasting - 2005

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 11:11 am and is filed under edtech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

1 On August 30th, 2006, Moving at the Speed of Creativity » Blog Archive » Rural and Muni WiFi projects said:

[...] For more on this, see my post from earlier this month: “More cities and towns considering municipal wireless” as well as my past posts on Floydada ISD and their 1:1 laptop learning initiative. [...]