The Silicon Valley Going To Get 1,500 Sq. Miles Of Wireless Coverage
- September 7th, 2006
- 2 Comments
Good news for our brothers in the Bay. The Metro Connect consortium, which includes Cisco and IBM, got the winning bid to provide WiFi to the entire Silicon Valley. Each city in the valley needs to approve the contracts, but Metro Connect is privately owned and plan to operate through sponsorships, not through money from each city.
What’s also interesting is that Internet VoIP calls will be charged extra, no doubt to not compete with current phone companies. A competing group, the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force, which is made of local government officials and utility companies’ representatives, have a competing plan to cover all areas from San Francisco down to Santa Cruz. We’ll see how Google will fit into this plan.
Silicon Valley Wireless Project Moves On [NYTimes]
Tony Leach (Who am I?)
2 years ago
This is great news for everyone who lives in the bay area. For most, DSL will become obsolete, as the wireless service will provide sufficient bandwidth to replace existing service. People will be able to access the service everywhere, not just in their own homes. Once nationalized, this can not only replace DSL, but cellular as well. I’ve called this Wireless 2.0.
I like that companies and governments across the country are seeing the value of ubiquitous Internet access, and are taking action upon themselves rather than waiting for Telco’s to catch up. I can’t wait until applications start to take advantage of this kind of functionality, reducing all of our dependencies on cell phones for mobile computing. Mobile versions of Google Maps and other localized services could actually start being useful once they’re removed from the cellular world.
Peter (Who am I?)
2 years ago
Oh great!!! I’m glad they decide to do this after I’ve moved away…although I highly doubt I’d get service where I used to live…it was a vortex I tell ya!