Esme Vos, founder of muniwireless.com, recently talked with American Public Media radio commentator Jon Gordon about how munis are re-thinking their plans for muni wireless networks in the wake of EarthLink’s re-evaluation of the market.Esme recently talked with American Public Media radio commentator Jon Gordon, host of Future Tense, about how cities are re-thinking their plans for muni wireless networks in the wake of EarthLink’s re-evaluation of the market.
Click here to hear what she had to say.
I heard you yesterday speaking with Jon Gordon of Future Tense. Although modest in size, would you consider what Google has done in Mountain View or MetroFi’s work in Portland to be examples of Muni Wi-Fi success? It probably also depends upon a person’s definition of success – I was thinking in more of wireless performance and as a business model in the case of MetroFi.
I ended up posting on the topic yesterday at Network Observations at: http://www.networkinstruments.wordpress.com.
Any time a city or a service provider creates a wide-area Wi-Fi network that people (muni employees, residents, visitors) find useful, I consider that a success. Muni Wi-Fi began among small towns that were stuck on dial-up. Those towns decided to deploy their own broadband networks because no one else would and the easiest, fastest and cheapest way to do that is using Wi-Fi. Those towns are as much as success story, perhaps even greater success stories, than unwiring places that already have lots of broadband options. So for me, large city Wi-Fi deployments are really successful if they allow the municipality’s employees to become more efficient and deliver better service to the city’s residents.