MuniWireless

The Portland city council voted unanimously to authorize the deployment of a citywide wireless broadband network. The city’s Bureau of Technology Services will put out a bid in August seeking a private company to build and operate the network. This is similar to the model followed by Minneapolis, Tempe and Oakland County (Michigan), among others. [Note see correction below]

The Portland city council voted unanimously to authorize the deployment of a citywide wireless broadband network. The city’s Bureau of Technology…

A Wi-Fi “cooperative” in Turku, Finland is driving the rollout of community wireless networking in that city. According to this report from Robin Good, “a city-wide Wi-Fi network of hotspots has been created in one month with no centralized investment or public funding. The basic idea here is that people themselves agree to share in a cooperative fashion their extra

A Wi-Fi “cooperative” in Turku, Finland is driving the rollout of community wireless networking in that city. According to this…

Minneapolis isn’t the only municipality that has attracted a lot of private sector interest in its wireless project (see article). In Oakland County, Michigan, twelve potential private sector partners including Nortel, Siemens and SBC are hoping to win the bid to unwire the entire county. The response to the RFQ was much better than expected according to the county. They

Minneapolis isn’t the only municipality that has attracted a lot of private sector interest in its wireless project (see article).…

The Minneapolis citywide Wi-Fi project is getting a lot of interest from large and small service providers around the US. According to this article by Mark Reilly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, more than 20 companies sent letters of their intention to become the prime contractor for the project. Mark says that the prospective vendors’ meeting drew more than 160 people from about 90 businesses. With the deadline, July 18, coming up, the city expects 9 companies to make…

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, or like me, have been in Brussels attending a seminar on the wonders of Swedish municipal broadband, you will not have heard about Orlando, Florida’s decision to stop the free downtown Wi-Fi service. I got back from Brussels today to find numerous emails pointing to this article in the Orlando Sentinel (“Citing lack of use, Orlando pulls plug on wireless Net zone”).

It must have been a slow news day in…

The Lautenberg-McCain bill which protects municipalities’ right to provide broadband services is finally available. The bill says that no state may prohibit a municipality from providing telecommunications services. It also provides that municipalities have to apply the same rules to private providers (anti-discrimination provision). Download the text of the bill from here (PDF format). Jim Baller’s site contains links to the Senators’ statements as well (Lautenberg cites the Wall Street Journal article and Granbury, Texas’s project, while McCain’s statement points…