MuniWireless

A consultant’s report on a proposed pilot project for a muni wireless network that would serve both government and schools in Appleton, Wisc.,  is in and the recommendation is positive. The corridor would cover an area approximately seven miles long and two to three-blocks wide. The preliminary report said the project was feasible.

The report estimates the cost of the pilot would be $200,000, not including the costs of specific applications or of mounting the transmitters on polls. The Appleton Post-Gazette…

The city of Houston plans to re-launch its muni wireless initiative and has issued an RFI to review proposals for the project. It was only a matter of time before cities recovered from the shockwaves from EarthLink’s retreat from the muni market and began re-evaluating how to provide broadband coverage. Houston is the first major city, among the many that put wireless initiatives on hold in the post-EarthLink shakeout, to announce plans to move ahead and re-issue an RFI. Houston…

Riders on board one of San Francisco’s Muni buses got a taste of free Wi-Fi and informational touch screens this week as the transit authority debuted its  ‘connected bus.’

The bus, which is a green as it is unwired,  had a special guest on board in the form of a Cisco representative to help users with the system. The Wi-Fi connection is routed through a Sprint data network using Cisco equipment.  In addition to providing public service, the system connects to the bus’s operational…

The city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will deploy a 4.9 Ghz wireless backhaul network in the first phase of a 97 square mile deployment of wireless video surveillance equipment. According to a press release announcing the deployment, the network will be able to scale to more than 100 camers as it is built out. Wi4Net, a solutions provider of integrated wireless video surveillance solutions, and Pivot3, Inc., whose high-definition mass storage system will be used to store the images, jointly announced today that the…

Brough Turner, chief technology officer at NMS Communications, recently drilled into the working paper from the New America Foundation,  Wireless Pittsburgh: Sustainability of Possible Models for a Wireless Metropolitan-Area Network . 

He criticizes the report, saying that in its analysis of sustainability it fails to mention “technology evolution or adoption rates of competing broadband services, i.e. cable and telco (DSL or FiOS).” He notes we’ve see Wi-Fi speeds rising as high as 100 Mbps in some of the products released  in advance of the IEEE’s adoption of…