MuniWireless

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…

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…