FON Router Giveaway

The Spanish start-up FON will give away its Wi-Fi routers, which will allow broadband subscribers to share their Internet connections with Wi-Fi users throughout their communities. "Freedom Friday," as the company is calling the event, will kick off at noon in San Francisco's Union Square.

Loma Linda: Fiber Town, USA?

Loma Linda, a town of 20,000 residents wedged between Riverside and San Bernadino in Southern California, says it was the first city in the U.S. to mandate a building code for residential and commercial structures to include fiber optics. They're inflating the costs to residents, however, to preserve profits for future private deployments. Some comparisons:

• Rotterdam: 30 Mbps upload and download service for $9 a month. That's $0.30 a megabit.
• France: 50 Mpbs upload and download service for $38 a month. That's $0.76 a megabit.
• Netherlands: 30 Mbps upload and download service for less than $9 a month.
• Loma Linda: 15 Mbps download planned for $100. That's $6.67 a megabit.
• Minneapolis: 5 Mpbs upload and download service max for $45 a month. That's $9.00 a megabit.

Esme Vos takes the town's CIO to task in the comments: "I cannot believe they are limiting the bandwidth so as not to undercut the future provider. That’s the wrong approach. LL should be upping the bandwidth, lowering the price to MAKE the provider compete and provide high bandwidth, cheaper service. LL should be setting a high floor, not a low ceiling."

Techdirt Corporate Intelligence: Techdirt Wireless - Early Testing Tools Available For WiMAX

This is another step towards actually having some mobile WiMAX equipment in the market. All the existing "mobile WiMAX" networks are just proprietary implementations of wireless networks misusing the standard's name.

3G for mobile broadband? Think again

While plenty of folks keep bringing up 3G cellular wireless as a "third pipe" to compete with DSL and cable, plenty of others are realizing it's not really competition at all. You get a slower connection, with a ton of limitations at a much higher cost.

MaxStream Extends ZigBee Range to 40 Miles

The XBee from MaxStream comes in an aluminum casing with dipole antennas and runs at the 900 MHz 1-Watt XTend frequency. ZigBee networks are designed to be so low-power, yet this little modem uses a powerful band at such a long distance. The XBee is set to start at $399.

Citywide Wi-Fi spending could hit $3 billion

More than $3 billion may be spent during the next four years to build and operate public wireless networks for U.S. municipalities, according to a new research report by MuniWireless.com. Spending will exceed $235 million in 2006 – significantly higher the forecast of $177 million made last year. For 2007, spending will reach $460 million, compared to last year’s estimate of $406 million. In 2008, U.S. spending will grow 105 percent to $940 million, and 2009 spending will increase another 87 percent to $1.8 billion. Among the other research findings:

• Public safety, building inspection and public works are the three most prevalent applications for public wireless networks.
• Large cities (those with a population of more than 500,000), which currently account for about one-third of all municipal wireless spending, will see their share of total spending grow to 40 percent by 2009.
• Approximately 44 percent of all 2006 expenditures will go toward hardware and packaged software products, with the remainder allocated to services such as applications development, training, systems design and integration, and consulting.

Triple Wired Threat for Wi-Fi for In-Home Triple Play

The triple play is the convergence of data, voice, and television (IPTV) across a single pipe. Wi-Fi’s in-home dominance of data and increasingly voice and IPTV (with proprietary extensions) will be challenged, ABI Research says, by the latest versions of three standards that work over coax, electrical wiring, and phone wiring. ABI Research says that by 2011, over 45 million gateways will offer wired-based distribution of data, voice, and video.

Metro-Scale Wi-Fi Testing Firm Launches

Uptown Services will offer independent performance evaluations of large-scale Wi-Fi networks. The company consults on municipal networks already, and is in discussions with one city for testing. Uptown will gather data at discrete points across the service area, and will test voice connections as well.

Nortel's Muni Push

Nortel is increasing investments in its Municipal Wireless Solutions. This includes opening a municipal wireless lab, launching new promotions for its Municipal Wireless Solution and accelerating collaboration with some of the industry's leading applications vendors.

Faster Testing Could Mean More Certified Wi-Fi

A new suite from Azimuth promises to cut automated Wi-Fi certification testing time by two thirds — even for non-PC products without a user interface.

Muni Wi-Fi deployment challenges (and how to solve them)

The cover story in the Technology Report of The Wall Street Journal is called “Civic Lessons“, a piece about the hurdles that cities and service providers face in deploying municipal wireless broadband networks.

Broadband is no Economic Panacea, But...

... it is a big part of a rural American resurgence. There's no limit of cities that believe if they build a fiber network, their area will suddenly witness an economic resurgence. Though as we've long discussed, Broadband deployment alone is obviously no panacea, and needs to go hand in hand with more practical improvements for an area's revitalization.

Mayors seek wi-fi coordination

While Minneapolis is looking to roll out its city-wide wi-fi plan next year, St. Paul is still considering what approach to take toward development of such a network. But mayors of both cities said at the Municipal Wireless Conference Tuesday that the future of city wi-fi in Minnesota would benefit from strong state leadership.

T-Mobile Tests Dual Wi-Fi and Cell Service

T-Mobile has become the first major carrier to allow a phone in the U.S. to communicate over both cellular networks and WiFi hot spots. Clearly, this could hurt a lot of Internet telephony companies, like Vonage and the plethora of other start-ups in this area. You can bypass them now by simply making a call with your cellphone, using your home WiFi connection (if you have one, of course). T-Mobile is behind in terms of customer count, and so this might help them. However, other carriers are bringing similar offerings to market soon.

New Orleans to Unplug Free Wi-Fi Network

New Orleans will give up its hard-fought battle for a free city-provided wireless Internet network once EarthLink Inc. finishes building out its initial wireless system, according to the city and EarthLink Inc. The wireless network that is run by the city for citizens will be taken down to avoid overlap between the two systems, said Mark Kurt, the city's director of information technology.