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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

This should be titled “Greedy US politicians listening to telecom lobbyists hinder broadband deployment” in honor of Representative Pete Sessions who introduced a bill banning municipal broadband services while holding SBC stock options. James Carlini writes on how millions of telecom lobbying dollars are spent keeping competition out of the broadband sector. The article also [...]

Washtenaw County in Michigan has issued a Request for Information (RFI) whose purpose is to get information for deploying a wireless broadband network for urban, rural and mobile use in 2007. Download the RFI in PDF format from here. If you are having trouble finding the RFI and downloading it, email me. Responses are due [...]

While writing the article about Brandon, Vermont’s plans to unwire their town, I contacted the Vermont Rural Broadband Project to find out which other communities are busy with wireless broadband deployments. Here’s what I found out. While most projects are endorsed by local governments, and some have received some funding from the state and/or a [...]

Check out Andrew Rasiej’s testimony at the New York City hearing on broadband held last June 10. You can find the link here on my friend, Mary Hodder’s excellent blog. You probably have already seen Andrew on Rocketboom last week. He is one of the few people running for office today who really understands the [...]