Wireless Oakland plan not off to a great start

It doesn't look like the wireless network that was planned to cover Michigan's 910-square-mile Oakland County is off to the most rousing of starts. The Wireless Oakland plan was to hook up seven pilot communities by the end of the summer, including the cities of Troy and Oak Park. So far, only two cities--Wixom and Pontiac--have been hooked up, but the others are still waiting. Organizers are saying the delay can be chalked up to the access point hardware taking longer than expected to be deployed, as well as the actual engineering of the network.

Google Wi-Fi Plan Hits San Fran Politics

"Every meeting is like the first," complains Google exec Chris Sacca. Blogger Davis Freeberg attended this week's Town hall meeting between Google, Earthlink and San Francisco leaders, and comes away concerned that bureaucracy and a "parade of activist oddballs who neither [understand] the technology nor the positive solical impact that free Wi-Fi could bring" is slowing negotiations to a crawl.

Solar Powered Wi-Fi in Minnesota

The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., considers solar-powered Wi-Fi network: The service would be deployed by ARINC of Maryland in the current plan, using 400 solar panels paired with batteries and Wi-Fi nodes. A city official estimates savings of $40,000 to $50,000 per year in electricity. Not noted is a comparison of upfront costs for solar deployment versus what are often highly variable costs in wiring nodes into utility pole power supplies. The power at poles and other locations can be of varying voltage, only in operation certain hours of the day, or taxed to the limit, requiring substantial rework to obtain additional juice.

Triple play via wireless mesh?

MuniWireless gets hot and heavy over Japan's NTT West using Strix equipment to help deliver something no other mesh player can. They got some facts wrong, however, and comments from a service provider and SkyPilot heat up the coversation.

Riverside: the Latest Tech Hot Spot?

A deal with AT&T, offering all residents free wireless Internet access, is part of an effort to get computers in every home and make the city more business-friendly. Civitium is advising.

Strix Wins Big Japanese Mesh Deal

Metro-scale network equipment provider Strix scores with a giant NTT West contract in Japan: The NTT subsidiary will roll out 802.11j service, using the 4.9 GHz band. Strix says the deployment will ultimately pass 50m people. The deployment uses Strix’s Access/One OWS and IWS (outdoor and indoor) multi-radio products that allow voice, video, and data with quality of service scheduling. 802.11a isn’t allowed in Japan, while 4.9 GHz is used for public safety purposes in the US and military purposes in some other countries. Strix is the only mesh vendor, according to Unstrung, that’s selling into the 4.9 GHz band for 802.11j support. SkyPilot and others offer 4.9 GHz public safety gear in the US.

Free.fr Is Freer via Wi-Fi

Iliad, the company behind France's cheap broadband, cheap IPTV, and cheap voice now adds free Wi-Fi. The new set-top box from the company, called Freebox, has FoN like wireless network sharing features built into it, and thus every one of its 300,000 boxes can become part of a big wifi mesh. They are using Wi-Fi with MIMO technology in their boxes. Basically if you have a wifi phone (or a laptop) you can hop on to one of these networks and stay connected.

Rural Wi-Fi Rescue

Richard Martin profiles Forest City, a North Carolina mill town hit hard by layoffs and trying to rebound with the help of municipal Wi-Fi.

Boston Lights First Hotspots

Boston is beginning its road to bringing wireless internet access to its citizens with today's announcement of three public access points--one covering a 1-square-mile section of the Roxbury neighborhood, along with two others covering the Faneuil Hall and Columbus Park sections of Boston. According to Mayor Menino, these access points are being viewed as templates for the Wi-Fi network that will be spreading across Boston over the next several months.

McAllen, Texas to Deploy Wireless Network in '07

City officials in McAllen, Texas are looking to put together a plan to develop and deploy a citywide wireless network sometime next year. The goal is to piece together a RFP within the next four months to have ISPs respond to in order to get the ball rolling. Estimations are that the construction of the network could run as high as $7 million, so the prevailing thought is to charge a monthly subscription fee of at least $15 to maintain it. In addition to the availability of the internet to users from virtually any location, city planners are envisioning the network as a resource for local government agencies as well as emergency responders.

Pols seek funding for wireless network on LI

The effort to bring wireless access to Long Island's Nassau and Suffolk counties got a big boost with Sen. Charles Schumer's announcement that he'll be introducing legislation after the November elections to bring at least $5 million in federal funds to help build the network. The senator says that he doesn't expect the counties to have the money in hand until October 2007. Until that time comes, it is imperative that officials in both counties develop a cohesive plan to hook up these populous areas. It never hurts to have a powerful politico on your side in the development of projects such as this.

WiSpry Attracts Funding

Fabless semiconductor company WiSpry has secured $13.5 million in Series B funding. The company will leverage the influx of financing to spur its next stage of growth. WiSpry, which is developing tunable radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) for wireless devices, plans to use the funds to ramp up development, production and sales.

Portland Gets Mobile WiMAX

Motorola will integrate Intel's WiMAX Connection 2250 into their CPEi 200 Series of WiMAX clients. Intel's Mobile WiMAX chip, formerly called Rosedale 2, is the first with dual mode support, bridging the worlds of fixed and mobile WiMAX. Optimized for cost-effective Mobile WiMAX (or fixed) deployments, Intel says Motorola, Alcatel, Navini, Proxim, Siemens and SR Telecom, among others, have announced they will incorporate the new Intel chip into their product lines. Maloney also said it has begun a mobile WiMAX trial in Portland, Oregon in collaboration with Clearwire and Motorola. The trial is expected to run through 2007.