I am seeing smarter approaches that foster leaner governmental budgets, citizen service focus, and less dependency on carriers who are not about to trade profit for public service productivity.

This trend can not only positively impact changes in cost of government and government service, but we have the opportunity to drive creativity and growth via both legacy and start-up organizations developing solutions for an emerging market.

I appreciate your real world insight to the need and difficulty of getting multiple public agencies and private sector partners to sit at one table. There are only three groups that need sit at one table and share infrastructure. You are working with probably the largest public sector owner of available fiber municipal assets in the US, the Department of Transportation.

In my experience with large municipals, I have found fiber being run at times to every traffic signal in a city. Put a wireless radio on that and you have a lot of available bandwidth. The other infrastructure players are utilities and public safety. Put these three together and you many find more available local network infrastructure than any local carrier has.

Your right, one side often doesn’t talk to the other side but in these economic times they are starting to look at alternatives. There is plenty of local fiber infrastructure in place and already paid for by taxpayers. It is shameful that these assets are not properly shared especially when it comes to supporting public safety. You are on the right track. Let me know how I can help.

Only today I was asked to submit a proposal for a major WiFi network for public transportation. The first question I was asked was ‘are you familiar with working with city government?’ I have been working for eight years in fact with city government over various WiFi projects, mostly in NYC. The basic challenge I have faced is that businesses have to make money while municipalities are responsible first to their constituencies, to the public. There will always be two sets of agendas. Businesses, tech businesses, need to move quickly to capitalize on opportunities. Municipalities will have their own schedule depending on public pressure, criticism, availability of funding, political considerations.

All told though, we need WiFi, if only because the cell networks from the carriers are buckling under the demand for mobile data.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34634571/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

Perhaps we should look at such partnerships from this lens. We’ll create WiFi Hot Zones in NYC, SF, and other for example, for muni purposes, in part by striking roaming agreements with AT+T and others. Building such networks is something my company, in partnership with Lemcon, my wireless network integrator, could absolutely do, if we had the necessary permissions for antenna locations (another major obstacle).

I did btw send your article along to the CTO of another city we are speaking to, so as to underline your case for shared open networks and smart edge devices.

If this is the year of wireless congestion, as the MSNBC article states, it needs to be the year we also collectively try to address that, and put some public services on that in the process.

I can appreciate the difficulty in developing public-private partnerships but as shown in the traffic signal example it is now a necessity or we will be stopping life saving applications. Some applications deal in milliseconds and you can’t be running them on two separate networks.

Look at the some of the stimulus grants that have been awarded. You will find major private sector communication, utility and power companies at times exceeding the federal grant support. In addition to these private sector trends, you are seeing public sector security mandates coming from the federal government in area such as public safety, transportation and utility grids. I see that both sides at this point have to work together.

Thanks for this exciting overview. This has been quite a year. The press can say what it wants. Moore’s Law holds sway here. iPhones now have the computing power of PCs circa 2004, and hundreds of millions of smartphones are now sold each year. 802.11n is now changing the game. We are entering into a world of pervasive wireless, and the localization of the internet.

As I recently blogged, Muniwireless is inevitable http://www.wiredtowns.com/2009/12/the-inevitable-future-of-muniw.html. A platform for community intranets is emerging that will support a suite of applications, services and experiences that will change how we interact socially and economically.

Now with intelligent devices hitting the market, local wireless networks can become as dumb as the internet itself, and as innovative a space. The internet has enabled the iPhone, Facebook, Amazon, because anyone with a new device, application, or service, has those dumb pipes to connect to.

What kinds of innovation can we expect in muniwireless, with all the intelligence now pushed to the edge? That’s up to municipalities to discover and develop.

We are currently speaking with a major U.S. city about deploying a large scale wireless network. We want to leverage the fact that this platform will be able to serve a multitude of purposes, public and private. The same network can have any number of SSIDs, provide connectivity for a number of verticals. Moore’s Law got us networking gear that worked well enough and devices that were powerful enough, Metcalf’s Law will make these networks ever more powerful as they grow node by node, application by application.

All said, from where I sit, the most difficult piece now is to establish these public-private partnerships. Getting the goals, timelines, and economic interests aligned, creating a common effort will be a greater challenge than the tech itself. The good news is, we now at last can have a common — and working — platform.