MuniWireless

Judy Estrin, former Chief Technology Officer of Cisco and an entrepreneur who started several tech companies, gives a video interview on why the US is losing its edge in tech and many other fields. Estrin has just published a book entitled “Closing the Innovation Gap” where she focuses not just on tech companies, but also on climate change and dependence on oil. She says: Our short-sightedness has led to major challenges — dependence on oil, climate change, health care, and…

What are the enlightened US Congress representatives doing when they’re not worrying about the sinking dollar, the collapse of the financial markets, a recession, the war in Iraq and global warming?

What else: auctioning off even more spectrum (as if we need yet another spectrum monopoly) so that some poor idiot can provide free Wi-Fi to consumers and public safety users, and of course, protecting those young impressionable minds from “obscene content”. Just to show you that silliness knows no party boundaries,…

Pasadena has shelved its plans for a citywide Wi-Fi network after EarthLink pulled out of its contractual obligations to build one for the city. EarthLink has done the same to a number of other cities (and surprisingly I have not heard one of them suing EarthLink for breach of contract).

According to this article, the problem was the business model: The ventures failed because the business model for such public-private partnerships just doesn’t work, said Morley Winograd, executive director of the…

Sascha Meinrath has posted a thoughtful piece about what makes a municipal wireless network successful. In this post, he mentions that several people take issue with the semantics itself: muni wireless, municipal wireless. That’s because a lot of people associate it either with (a) a network run by the government funded by the government or (b) a network run by a private company funded entirely by a private company (e.g. the EarthLink model). But that’s beside the point. Sascha does…