MuniWireless

In most press releases announcing the creation of a citywide Wi-Fi network or a small Wi-Fi hotzone, the municipality always says that its goal is to make the city attractive to businesses and tourists. But how many cities really know how to use outdoor public Wi-Fi to help tourists?

Here is one easy way, but it does assume that many people will possess a portable Wi-Fi device such as an iPod Touch, an iPhone, a Wi-Fi Blackberry, Wi-Fi enabled Nokia phone. So this…

ChinaStakes.com reports that Shanghai is poised to become China’s first wireless city. It will be interesting to see if the prophecy comes true. The city is one of many in China that have undertaken wireless initiatives and it appears locked in competition with Beijing to unwire first.

Shanghai, which is arguably the country’s most commerical city in terms of its role in international trade, appears locked in competition with Beijing, the nation’s capital, in a race to claim the title of…

Seoul City’s Cheonggye waterway has launched a wireless network, targeted to enhancing the experience of tourists and business visitors traveling to the city. The waterway and its surrounding park area opened in 2005 to much public acclaim as an urban renewal project.

The deployment was conducted by Samsung SDS using a Firetide advanced wireless mesh and access network solution to support applications that range from beaming visitor information to rented PDAs to public video surveillance and underwater video cameras to monitor wildlife…

Technology writer Jeremy Hsu, writing for the IEEE Spectrum, reports that widespread individual and corporate adoption of wireless technologies has produced a Wi-Fi cloud over Salt Lake City could be a “make do” alternative to a municipal wireless network. The article goes on to postulate “Such unplanned wireless networks could provide the foundation for integrated citywide wireless coverage without huge investments in new infrastructure.”

Ad hoc networks can be–and are–powerfully attractive in areas where public access is the only goal of a…

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…

Moovera Networks will deploy wireless broadband Internet access on the new Glasgow Flyer shuttle bus service at the Arriva Scotland West airport. Moovera Networks will deploy wireless broadband Internet access on the new Glasgow Flyer shuttle bus service at the Arriva Scotland West airport.

Eleven luxury buses that operate between the airport and Glasgow city center will be equipped with Moovera’s Moovbox M100 mobile broadband gateway to provide access at speeds of up to 1.4Mbps.

Click here to read the press release.