Greater Windy City of Wireless Broadband

Damn, the Chicago area is getting to be the hot zone for new wireless broadband plans. Last week the Chicago Tribune wrote that EarthLink and AT&T are bidding to build city-wide Wi-Fi networks. Sprint has already picked the city for one of its WiMAX launch cities.

Now Nortel wants in on a WiMAX action too, though they are staying away from the windy city, and focusing on the cities that lie within the greater Chicago-area. (Take that Motorola!)

The planned deployment is actually 170 miles west of Chicago, so there won’t be competition per se. But the Canadian telecom gear maker wants to build a WiMAX network for the Moline Dispatch Publishing Company over the Quad-Cities region of western Illinois and eastern Iowa, including Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa and Moline/East Moline and Rock Island in Illinois. A Nortel spokesperson said the WiMAX deployment wouldn’t compete with Sprint’s WiMAX network in Chicago.

The deployment is small, but Nortel has been betting on WiMAX as a way to turn around its business. Nortel hasn’t picked up any business from Sprint so far. Nortel says it has WiMAX deals with Chunghwa in Taiwan and Craig Wireless in Greece, and is working on trials with Golden Telecom in Russia, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) in Japan, and Telefónica Móviles in Mexico.

But back to Chicago and wireless: what makes it so special that most of these companies are doing their trials there?

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