San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that citywide wireless Internet access is slowly becoming a reality despite political infighting – and that 144,000 residents will be surfing the Web for free by the end of the year at no cost to the city.

He’s talking about the Meraki network of course:

Newsom is calling the idea Wi-Fi 2.0 – a nod to his high-profile but unsuccessful first attempt to bridge the “digital divide” between San Franciscans who take Internet access for granted and low-income people who can’t easily log on to e-mail, find job listings or surf news sites.

The mayor’s office is working to ensure that single-room-occupancy hotels and public housing projects are some of the first to receive the devices because residents there typically don’t have Internet access. Five public housing projects now have the technology, and 13 more are expected to have it by the end of the year, Newsom said.

As large-scale, for-profit projects falter, innovative new models emerge, as John Cox writes on NetworkWorld:

Strictly speaking, the community networking projects don’t require municipal involvement at all. They are self-organized, self-funded local movements that use a variety of technologies, both open source and modified commodity products, to share existing broadband services, such as DSL connections. And they use the unlicensed radio bands for wireless access.

“We need to get back to the original rationales [of] why we should be building these networks in the first place,” Sascha Meinrath, research director, Wireless Future Program, at the New America Foundation says. “Personally, I’m business model agnostic. I’m far more focused on how these models meet the social and economic justice
needs of the communities they serve.”

The article further covers 10 interesting muni wifi projects, including San Fran’s Meraki network, PTP, a wireless crime-fighting video network, and others.

Post from: Free Australia Wireless

Municipal Wifi 2.0 = Community Wifi 1.0?