The attention on city-wide wireless isn’t just stateside, and Paris has delivered a media-savvy mayor to rival SF’s. The mayor told reporters that Paris is looking to add 400 WiFi spots through out the city, which will be run by private companies that will bid on the contract next year. In addition the city will lower taxes on local fiber deployments.
Wifi eh? All these massive wifi deployments remind me of when my alma mater decided to put ethernet jacks at every desk on campus. An incredible about of time and energy were spent to make that work only to have Wifi come on the scene about half way through the project, making it completely obsolete.
Who wants to take bets that by, or shortly after, these projects are completed something like WiMax will have made them obsolete (or at the least, bad investments).
Richard,
You might be onto something there. I think the current Muni WiFi technologies are good for smaller cities.
I have often had trouble with getting access to T-Mobile WiFi when sitting outside a Starbucks.
However, there is a new generation of wireless chips/technologies currently under development that will make it all work nicely.
I hope :-)
Looks like politicians are taking a publicity ride on a hot issue. Sounds great to promise, but more complicated to deploy.
Here in Jerusalem the Municipality launched with a lot of noise a Jerusalem Unwired project sponsored by Intel and other companies. As a first step they set 2-3 wifi zones in central business areas, with the promise of unwiring the whole city within a couple of years…
A year later – there is still only 2-3 zones with talk of closing down completely, if they don’t find additional sponsors…
Bur – they got their PR!
Meh… All these big cities getting all the big publicity. In South Africa the resort-town of Knysna went wireless a while before any of them. The local council initiated the project over a year ago. Like Paris, they put the infrastructure and management out to tender, and the network went live somewhere around the beginning of the year.
The real pain behind the project was that the municipality needed to get network access to outlying areas (that previously fell outside its jurisdiction) in the face of expensive and inadequate wired alternatives. (What happens when the state-owned telco tries to operate an IP network.) As a result the network is certainly more than “just a few hotspots in the centre of town.”