San Antonio will test the muni-Wi-Fi waters with a public downtown hotspot to be built and managed by AT&T which has its corporate headquarters in the city.San Antonio will test the muni-Wi-Fi waters with a public downtown hotspot to be built and managed by AT&T which has its corporate headquarters in the city.
AT&T will deploy wireless Internet access in a two-square-mile downtown area and provide free ad-supported access of up to 200 Kbps to residents, downtown workers and tourists for the next 18 months.
The San Antonio Business Journal quotes an AT&T spokesperson saying that the speed should be sufficient for persons checking e-mail. Sure, 200 Kbps is faster than dial-up but its way slower than the company’s promised 768 Kbps downstream speed for its basic at-home DSL service. Of course, AT&T will also sell daily and weekly passes that deliver speeds up to 1 MBps.
Fortunately, the city will be testing more than just public acceptance of the free tier of service. (I question how successfully 200 Mbps speed can inspire use, particularly on networks deployed in downtown areas where that will be frequented by business professionals accustomed to much, much faster speeds in their offices. But San Antonio’s plan encompasses more than just this free access.
It is part of an ambitious downtown redevelopment project proposed by Mayor Phil Hardberger last year.The test network is being billed as a pilot project that AT&T might expand to other parts of the city and the city is exploring applications that could include remote meter reading and emergency applications to report rising floodwaters, according to a story in the San Antonio Express News (which also quotes our own Mike Perkowski, chief operating officer here at Muniwireless.com).
Click here to read the story in the San Antonio Express News.
Click here to read the story in the San Antonio Business Journal.
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