County-Wide Wireless To Be Deployed in Michigan

alien88 writes "Late last week, the Washtenaw County Board approved Wireless Washtenaw Advisory Board's recommendation of 20/20 Communications to cover the entire county with wireless by the end of 2007. This includes Ann Arbor, the home of University of Michigan and future home of Google's Adwords division. The wireless network will be free for speeds up to 85kbps and $35/month for 500kbps. 20/20 Communications estimates it will take around 6,000 radios to cover the county.

This initiative is being funded without taxpayer dollars and is one of the most ambitious wireless deployments in the U.S. Will it succeed or will it fail? Check out the county's wireless website for updates on the project." Of course, the real reason this is worth posting is it's because this is the county where Rob, myself and a number of the others live.

Comments

I'm using Culver City CA Wifi right now

[billstewart]

Culver City's an LA suburb a bit north of LAX. It's flatland, not hilly. I'm sitting in my hotel room using the city's free WiFi right now. Performance isn't great, but I'm on an upper floor, and the hotel people said it really works a lot better down in the lobby. There's a bit of technical description here - there are three Firetide Hotpoint mesh routers fed by a 3 Mbps DSL gateway.

The main difficulty I've had is that my PC can see multiple hotspots, so sometimes if I've hibernated the machine and woken it up again, it'll grab a different hotspot than last time and need another negotiation with the Acceptable Use Policy page. (You have to acknowledge that it's free, they might censor pornography, hate speech, and spyware, and you won't sue them for blocking those things. You also have to agree not to download those things - certainly most people I know are perfectly willing to not download spyware :-)