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Washtenaw county is home to CmdrTaco (Rob Malda), which has a plan to bring wireless to the whole county. It, too, seems to be having problems with financing. The plan was to have a free service with paid members getting faster access. The second link claims that to be profitable, 5% of the county needs to sign up.

But a good portion of the population (i.e. most of Ann Arbor) can get fairly cheap DSL through AT&T/Speakeasy (okay, maybe Speakeasy isn't so cheap), or most of the county (I think) can get cable through Comcast.

Students on the U of M campus (a sizable portion of the city's population) can get wireless from many locations. It's not uncommon to have people run open WiFi spots in neighborhoods around campus as well. People push these wireless services as enabling low-income households and rural areas to get broadband speeds. Low-income households are likely to not find the faster service worth buying, and rural areas still have substantial infrastructure costs (the houses are spread out more, and wireless access points have fairly pitiful range). I'm just not sure current wireless technology is really a better solution for the "last mile".

On the other hand, it seems to make some sense for dense downtown regions. People like to congregate there, and businesses might be willing to chip in (instead of many businesses administering their own wireless access points). People who live downtown might be willing to pay $10 or $20/mo to get faster speeds where they live and in all the businesses they frequent.

But county-wide, like this Washtenaw program? I'm just not sure the demand is there and/or the technology is sufficient.

Hm... did the counties in Michigan copy each other's notes? Your "Wireless Oakland" is almost identical to our Wireless Washtenaw, save the private party involved.

I'm really looking forward to having Wi-Fi out in the marshes by me. There's even a chance I'll get a radio mounted on top of my house, which would include the fastest/best package available (numbers are failing me) in exchange for the mounting rights. The whole thing really is a win-win all the way round, both the service-for-mounting deal and the county-wide Wi-Fi, assuming enough people actually do sign up. I predict many of us will.

Washtenaw County (Ann Arbor) is looking to do wireless county wide. (http://wireless.ewashtenaw.org./ Their model uses the government as only the facilitator of the service, and asks that vendors come in to provide end users services and options. This is a good model because it allows for competition, instead of government wireless w/o competition. This way - you can get wireless countywide, but are not stuck with whoever's CEO sold the 'cheapest' solution.....

My understanding is that google maps is purposely limited so people can't "see swingsets" in back yards

Where might that understanding have come from?

It is more likely that they simply don't have the data. Satellites can't resolve much more than what's available at Google.

Local municipalities have aerial photos. Keyhole probably pays for aerial photos of larger citires, but is unlikely to get the entire US.

A good site to see high resolution aerials of Washtenaw county, MI (includes Ann Arbor) is here. Select browse, click somewhere on the image, then zoom in a few times. On the right hand side (after zooming in suficiently) you can select 2002 photos and see (among other things) kids playsets.

It has a nice picture of the 107,501 seat Michigan Stadium (Ann Arbor population: 115 thousand) on the corner of Main and Stadium in Ann Arbor.

I imagine other municipalities have similar resources available, though a lot of aerial imagery is still in flat files at the county office for many counties in the US.

-Adam

I'd ideally like to also have a list of all ongoing road construction projects, estimated completion dates, as well as current progress (updated daily/weekly).