What's the state of city connectivity?
The WSJ has an article today (subscription required) about a bunch of developments in US city wifi.
MuniWireless.com (running a key conference today and tomorrow in Minneapolis) tells us that there are more than 300 cities across the US that are working on wireless access. There seem to be widely varying ways of providing service, and the telcos are getting into the act. From the WSJ article:
“It's all about the extension of the broadband access for our customers,” says Eric Shepcaro, vice president for business development at AT&T. “It's also about leveraging assets that we already have in place.”
But look at Personal Telco in Portland. Or Wireless Leiden in The Netherlands. Or everything Sascha Meinrath is doing. And don't miss NYC Wireless.
It would be good to know how well open, public, free, non-registration city wifi networks are doing in the US. Once I get my mythical phone that is wireless enabled and open-platform (so that any developer can write software for it that allows me to easily use the location-based services I like), I'll need a free, open wireless connection wherever I go.
Is that too much to ask?
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3 Responses to “What's the state of city connectivity?”
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Although I don't enjoy saying this… I'm going to say 'yes' you're asking too much.
I have the feeling that North American cities are broadband 'rich enough'.
That's a good thing in most respects, but I believe it means there isn't enough pain to keep a community organization energized to the point of deploying and operating an 802.11 network to a critical mass where it supplies network-sized economies of increasing return. In other words: demand is mostly being met, at a reasonable price, by existing telecommunications infrastructure.
If technologies like Roofnet or CUWiNware were packaged in every 802.11 node leaving manufacturers then I suppose more multi-hop networks might form accidentally.
At this point in history, in urban settings, I suggest interesting applications are ones that take advantage of random wireless networks being left open. When these “default opportunities” are presented to your application move as many bits as is reasonable and considerate. Here you are absolutely correct: location-aware, open-platform handsets are a prerequisite for these types of applications.
Susan,
high-speed access at homes in Sofia, where you arrive today, means 100 Mbps, or in some cases 1000 Mbps.
There are hundred of Internet Service Providers, and prices are quite low.
I will send you a presentation on that.
I think demand is being met currently, yes, but that demand has no where to go but up.
The greatest hurdle (and I'm sure telcos have been thinking hard about this issue already) is making providing a service like this profitable. Once telcos can find the profit in providing city-wide wireless access they can A.) invent the demand for it with new products and B.) develop the necessary infrastructure many times faster than municipal governments can.
So the fact that wifi phones are starting to enter the mainstream only reinforces the notion that infrastructure cant be far behind; why develop the product if there are no plans for the necessary infrastructure to be built?
I'm guessing the WSJ article elaborates on how telcos are getting more involved.