Last year we gave our thoughts on municipal Wi-Fi, and if you remember WEBbeams has long been an opponent of cities jumping into the Wi-Fi market. Among the reasons for our negative outlook on these municipal Wi-Fi projects has been the low-quality Internet signal such large-scale initiatives generally provide. Well, we certainly haven’t been alone in our thoughts. If you’re interested in a few recent articles on the topic, check out Business Week’s “Municipal Wi-Fi: A Failure to Communicate – Municipal Wi-Fi Networks Don’t Quite Deliver on the Promise of Wide-ranging Access” and Pantagraph’s “Despite High Hopes, Cities Struggle with WiFi” as well as Business Unusual’s “Muni WiFi’s Failures & the Digital Divide” and WiFi Gurus’ “Is public Wi-Fi good enough?”. Complaints from cities who’ve explored or implemented citywide Wi-Fi include higher-than-expected costs and fewer users than expected. These two downfalls have left many cities with much larger bills than expected – and fewer customers helping to repay those loans.

In the city of Aurora, Illinois, home of about 150,000 people, several alderpersons have launched a new plan that they hope will keep at-risk kids and former inmates away from drugs and crime. The program will teach individuals how to rebuild donated computers, which may then be sold to fund future training. Better yet, the alderpersons hope they’ll receive enough funding from grants and local businesses that they can give the computers to low-income families for free. By learning these basic and intermediate computer skills, trainees should be qualified for better, higher-paying jobs than they might have previously found. Will the program succeed? Well, a similar approach has garnered some press lately in Houston, Texas, but with bikes instead of computers. The Third Ward Community Bike Center’s Earn-a-Bike program, recently featured on a PBS program, attracts kids and teens each Saturday to fix up bikes for local charities. In a neighborhood where many residents cannot afford cars, bikes play an essential role in transportation. After putting in enough time, the students can earn their own bike. These innovative approaches to addressing the causes of a problem – and not just dealing with the effects – are surely worth noting.

Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz about the latest generation of Wi-Fi, known as 802.11n, being released this summer in its first draft. The letter “n” along with previous incarnations of Wi-Fi – “b,” “a,” and “g” – refers to a subset of the technical guidelines, issued by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Experts expect “n,” as it’s known, to work about five times faster than “g” and penetrate walls and “dead spots” more effectively. In addition, “n” will use multiple radios to send and receive data, which should help users transfer video files more effectively. So what does this mean for Wi-Fi enthusiasts still using a previous version of 802.11? Well, as with any technology, it will probably take at least a year to work out the bugs in “n.” The final version of this frequency probably won’t launch until 2009, and we recommend waiting for the proven, kinks-free “n.” If you own or frequent a WEBbeams hotspot, you’re in luck. We supply all of our hotspots high-quality, carrier-class routers that can be easily upgraded when necessary – a great savings versus buying new Wi-Fi gear.