A giant wireless network to cover the Silicon Valley
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Up to now, it was city councils planning to deploy their wireless networks. San Fransisco, Milpitas, Bay Area, Anaheim to name a few of them. So, although business models still oscillate between free/ad-supported or paid access, it’s time to launch bigger plans.
And bigger means a WiFi network covering the Silicon Valley area. Seven companies met the RFP. MetroFi, Cisco Systems, SeaKay, Blue Horizon, Community Wireless, Fire2Wire, NextWLAN. The duo Earthlink/Google stepped out of the competition this time.
The area sure is important. Because of the region prestige, no one would consider the capital of hi-tech innovation to be blanketed by a dull wireless network. And because of the topography of the region that brings a lot of technical complication.
The Wireless Silicon Valley project plan will close on next mid-September with the announcement of a winning vendor. As noticed the Mercury News, “the project, which launched in April, comes at a time when an estimated 250 communities across the United States are planning similar networks or have already built them.”
Jul 3, 2006 | By Nuno
3 comments
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I don’t want WIFI, I want faster, cheaper reliable fiber network to the home. I want a reliable 100Mbps up and download speed. WiFi will not deliver that anytime soon. The SF Bay area is going after a network that never meant to deliver five 9 reliability.
That’s the Internet 2, Dave. And I guess there are a bunch of people working on it. But meanwhile, do you think that in the Silicon Valley, improving and expanding fiber networks would be cheaper and easier than setting a WiFi network almost from scratch? Not a trick question, I just don’t have any clue.
You wrote, “The duo Earthlink/Google stepped out of the competition this time.” I don’t want to be a nitpicking irritant, but EarthLink and Google have partnered for a grand total of one bid, in San Francisco, while EarthLink has won bids or contracts and is bidding on now something like 15 or 20 networks. EarthLink has said repeatedly that Google will be a customer of theirs in San Francisco, paying EarthLink for the right to give bandwidth away at a fraction (300 Kbps vs 1 Mbps) of the full-priced offering.