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10/01/2004: "WiFi as backbone (film at 11)"

Municipal Wi-Fi in OK by Phil Windley:

Dave Fletcher points out that Oklahoma City is building a 400 square mile Wi-Fi network at the cost of $78 million. As Dave says "Wow!" What's sad is that this is just for public safety--no citizen access as far as I can tell. Even if it were, they' still wouldn't be able to do any interesting broadband projects that involve significant bandwidth, such as video. Utopia opponents were always saying "Wi-Fi is cheaper and will obsolete fiber." This proves them wrong.


Phil is one of the proponents behind UTOPIA

UTOPIA is a consortium of 14 Utah cities engaged in deploying and operating a 100% fiber optic network to every business and household (about 140,000) within its footprint. Operating at the wholesale level, it supports open access and promotes competition in all telecommunications services.

This, my friends, is a real "community network", unlike those proposed by various wireless proponents, some of you have yet to find a clue about how RF works.

Getting an entire county together to make this happen seems like a large hurdle, but I forsee a rapidly approaching day when neighborhoods as well as condo and apartment complexes get themselves wired up with fiber optics in a neutral architecture a lot like UTOPIA's. I would picke a Metro Ethernet solution over MPLS, but thats probably Monday morning quarterbacking.

Think of it as Wayport (done right), and on a slightly grander scale.