MuniWireless

St. Cloud got the top honors because it has 100% service availability, delivered good performance throughout the community, and is free and easy to use. St. Cloud (Florida) was ranked no. 1 in the US among metro Wi-Fi cities by Novarum, a consulting firm established by Phil Belanger (formerly of BelAir Networks) and Ken Biba (formerly of Vivato). St. Cloud got the top honors because it has 100% service availability throughout the community, delivered good performance across town and is free and easy to use. Novarum’s findings show that a network where Internet access is free of charge can deliver a better user experience than those that do charge for access.

Others in the top ten list are Mountain View, Toronto, Anaheim, Philadelpha, Santa Clara, Galt, Palo Alto, Tempe and Madison. Click

to see the Top Ten Metro Wi-Fi overall rating list.Novarum also listed the (where performance is defined from a user’s point of view). Performance is controlled by the service provider who can limit the amount of bandwidth but it is also affected by the number of wireless mesh nodes deployed in an area. The top city on the list is Toronto. According to Novarum, the best performing network in Toronto had the highest node density and the 10th ranked network had the lowest node density of networks in the list.Combined cellular and Wi-Fi ratingsSt. Cloud got top marks again in the overall combined cellular and Wi-Fi ranking because of 100% availability and speed. Sprint’s service in Mountain View, however, got second place. The criteria for inclusion in this list are performance and service availability, ease of use and value of the service. Eight of the top ten rated networks are cellular networks. They are after all more mature than metro Wi-Fi services. Click to view the list.Roaming charges and speed matterSo if cellular networks outperform metro Wi-Fi, why should people even bother deploying municipal wireless broadband networks? I can think of at least two reasons:(1) Horrendous roaming charges: when I travel outside the Netherlands, my cellular provider charges me a lot of money (15 EUR per megabyte) for cellular data service. I got a bill for 250 EUR when I was in Lisbon last November for light web browsing and checking email on my mobile phone. Having Wi-Fi everywhere will allow people like me to avoid the highway robbery that the mobile operators carry out on people who travel (ironically, it’s those who are truly mobile who suffer most).

(2) Speed: Toronto’s network delivered downstream throughput of 2212 kbps and 1611 kbps upstream (averaged across all locations tested) and indeed service from some locations was in excess of 5000 kbps in both directions. HSDPA networks can’t even deliver that kind of bandwidth.