MuniWireless

Santa Clara’s non-profit electric utility has acquired the wireless nodes installed by MetroFi to create a wireless automated meter reading system and deliver free Wi-Fi service around neighborhoods. The utility bought the nodes at $500 per unit (retail price is $2500). MetroFi went out of business last year after attempting to create citywide Wi-Fi networks in Portland (Oregon), Santa Clara, CA and a number of other cities.

Excerpt from the San Jose Business Journal:

The system operates through “access points” that transfer…

After filing for bankruptcy protection earlier this month, Nortel has also decided to pull out of the mobile WiMAX market. It will still sell fixed WiMAX equipment. This should come as no surprise. Nortel failed to win the Sprint contract (losing out to Motorola). It has not managed to gain any critical mass in the 802.16e equipment market outside the United States. Nortel entered into a partnership with Alvarion in 2008 whereby the two companies had agreed to integrate Alvarion’s…

WiFi Rail, a company that designs and deploys Wi-Fi networks in public transport, has signed a 20-year agreement with BART to roll out Wi-Fi service on all BART trains. Passengers already have Wi-Fi access in four downtown SF stations (I’ve logged onto the network with with my iPod Touch and it was quite fast), as well as in Hayward. According to WiFi Rail, “during the year of testing, more than 15,000 consumers registered and used the system more than 85,000…

Last week I posted “Is Your ISP a Bad ISP?” pointing to a wiki with a list of Internet service providers who throttle P2P traffic. One person submitted a comment saying that the list is outdated. Now, you can find out for yourself if indeed, your ISP is playing funny games with your connection. I tested Glasnost on my Comcast Internet service in San Francisco and they passed the test.

Simply go to Glasnost (appropriate name as it refers to a…

Harold Feld tries to answer the question: why are we paying so much money for text messaging?

Excerpt:

The cost charged to consumers for text messaging has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the actual cost of the service. Yet — as we are constantly reminded — the cell phone market has four national players and numerous regional players. This makes it squindoodles more competitive than, say, the broadband market in most places in the country where you can generally get two…

In listening to a replay of Tuesday’s Verizon/Verizon Wireless year-end earnings conference call, I did hear some more optimism from company execs about launching “commercial” deployments of Long Term Evolution services by the second half of 2010 — not as aggressive as once thought, but still well ahead of stated LTE plans from other big national carriers.

But sifting through the financial data, I wasn’t able to quickly find any evidence that Verizon is starting to spend on infrastructure to make…