Editor's Corner

A lot of the high profile news with wireless networks has been focused on municipal deployments, starting with Philadelphia's effort, which is just taking off. Other cities have followed and sparked the same debate--how can municipalities get into the networking business and not cause unfair competition for those commercial vendors trying to make money doing the same thing? This week the city of Tempe, AZ, announced it will be launching the biggest citywide wireless network--spanning a 40-sq.-mi. area. Not only will it be providing data networking functionality but also better voice and video application capabilities. On top of that, the service will be offered to residents, and the city is putting its emergency services and government agencies on a separate network system using the same technology.

Maybe I'm naive or just a huge optimist, but the way I see it, these municipal networking efforts are a huge boon to wireless vendors. They will likely boost user numbers and adoption overall, building a bigger consumer market base to which vendors can push new services down the road. Yes, a municipal network isn't going to make any vendor a billion-dollar company, but as they're deployed throughout the country they will clearly foster use and user reliance on new wireless technologies. That's not a bad thing by a long shot. - Judy