Spokane Gets Unwired

prostoalex writes "Spokane International Airport is getting wireless connectivity just before the city will expand WiFi coverage to 100 blocks in Spokane downtown. It will be the largest urban Wi-Fi zone in the United States, said Bob Conley, a founder of Vivato, the company that made the antennas for both installations. Vivato's press release mentions the service will be useful not only to casual downloaders. The downtown 'Hot Zone' will improve city services by facilitating intelligent policing, quicker fire and rescue response, and will support e-government initiatives and a more productive mobile workforce."

Comments

Ehhh

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know that I like wifi being used for real substantive critical things like emergency services. It's still just a little too unreliable, signal can get messed up by whatever... I'd hate to have my house being burned down and the fire department doesn't know because the weather messes up their wireless network.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think, soon you'll be able to walk around the city and wirelessly hack into thousands of unsecure systems.

This takes the whole getting-onto-the-neighbor's-802.11-connection to a whole new level.

Double-edged sword

[nsample]

The real hope is that this service, as it relates to emergency response, does not become another layer of dependency. At Stanford we had the pleasure of testing IP phones in the CS department and living with the fact that when the power fails, the phones are gone, too.
As an old man, a child of the 70s, I was used to power and telephone access being separate concerns. We liked it.

By isolating services, you often get safety through redundancy. Wiring emergency response into a new infrastructure is a dangerous proposition.
Keep fire and rescue response on their own bands. Keep alarm systems on dry pairs. Etc. Save a life today; be old school. ;)

Like it or not, WiFi is here to stay

[chia_monkey]

We've heard many people ranting on about how insecure WiFi is, how it will never catch on, and so forth. Then you hear people talk about how great it is. Like it or not, it's here to stay. I like to think of WiFi as the new "wild west", the dotcom of the new generation. Just like the earlier dotcoms, companies are scrambing to make their mark. Some will fail miserably, some will grow to be giants, and some will be successful and be eaten (or destroyed) by the giants. It's still early in the game and it's hard to tell who will win out. Cometa is gone and they had some big backers. Maybe they just didn't have the proper management or revenue model. It'll be interesting to see how this all turns out.