St. Cloud got the top honors because it has 100% service availability, delivered good performance throughout the community, and is free and easy to use. St. Cloud (Florida) was ranked no. 1 in the US among metro Wi-Fi cities by Novarum, a consulting firm established by Phil Belanger (formerly of BelAir Networks) and Ken Biba (formerly of Vivato). St. Cloud got the top honors because it has 100% service availability throughout the community, delivered good performance across town and is free and easy to use. Novarum’s findings show that a network where Internet access is free of charge can deliver a better user experience than those that do charge for access.
Others in the top ten list are Mountain View, Toronto, Anaheim, Philadelpha, Santa Clara, Galt, Palo Alto, Tempe and Madison. Click
to see the Top Ten Metro Wi-Fi overall rating list.Novarum also listed the (where performance is defined from a user’s point of view). Performance is controlled by the service provider who can limit the amount of bandwidth but it is also affected by the number of wireless mesh nodes deployed in an area. The top city on the list is(2) Speed: Toronto’s network delivered downstream throughput of 2212 kbps and 1611 kbps upstream (averaged across all locations tested) and indeed service from some locations was in excess of 5000 kbps in both directions. HSDPA networks can’t even deliver that kind of bandwidth.
Just a note about the St. Cloud, FL Network. These performance tests were run when the network was not optimal. We are anticipating some new network optimization efforts in the next few months that will dramatically enhance the performance of the network. This network was designed and Implemented by Hewlett-Packard Mobility, Voice and Network Solutions Organization (MVNSO).
Would be interesting to see what criteria and tests these boys did to determine performance.
Would also like to know if they considered cost/node to install and cost/node/mo to maintain ??
These are key for us in the Service Provider business and will also be for the Munipality as these networks grow and they need to step in and support their providers as they expand or upgrade their network to deal with real world use.
In short anyone can deploy a Node/AP every 500 feet or so and include a Gateway every 3rd Node/AP and get great performance.
Just love it when vendors say that the best networks are the ones with the most Nodes/Sq Mile-What great spin.
Jacomo