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Municipal Wi-Fi - A Promise Unfulfilled?
An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Merron at InformationWeek writes about the problems with municipal Wi-Fi, and how despite the high hopes of cities across the country there hasn't been much success deploying it in reality. He also examines the few successful applications of the technology, and tries to explore why more projects don't make it out of their infancy. 'Thus far, there have been a few true municipal Wi-Fi success stories and several spectacular failures. But more than half of municipal Wi-Fi networks remain only in the planning stages. The broad consensus among analysts and providers is that the only viable business models will be centered around municipal government applications, which appear to be able to provide cities with the ability to provide both better and more cost-efficient services for residents and increase city revenue. This will ensure that providers like EarthLink can recoup their capital costs within a few years.'"
haven't heard a thing about it in the news anywhere, but all these access points are coming up 'city of minneapolis' and 'minneapolis wifi' and such, they have great signal strength but are flaky as hell (network/router errors and such, not wifi connection problems) - my guess is they're testing. ...every few blocks or so, on a telephone pole there's these coffee can looking things that have 2 antennas, they've been putting them up over the last few months... I figured they were shot spotters but now with the APs on I'm guessing thats the wifi. haven't heard it on the evening news or in the strib.
its way faster than the neighbor's connections i've been using
promise fulfilled here, so far anyways