New Orleans CIO vows to keep free city Wi-Fi at high speeds
After surviving Hurricane Katrina and the early recovery efforts following last year’s disaster, the CIO of New Orleans said he plans to continue fighting to keep a free downtown wireless Internet network functioning at high speeds.
The public Wi-Fi service, set up with $1.2 million in donated equipment, has been "a lifeline" in the recovery from the deadly storm, serving residents, businesses, public safety officials and building inspectors who have vastly increased their numbers of inspections to help the rebuilding process, CIO and CTO Greg Meffert said in an interview this week. Tropos Networks in Sunnyvale, Calif., and Intel Corp. donated the labor and equipment for the public Wi-Fi after the storm;
Now the city wants to expand the network in a deal with Earthlink Inc., Meffert said.But the telecommunications lobby, which offers competing forms of broadband Internet service, opposes keeping the service above 128kbit/sec. once the city’s state of emergency is lifted. Telecoms point to a two-year-old law that sets standards for competition in Louisiana for broadband, including limits on keeping speeds at 128kbit/sec. in municipal broadband networks.
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Posted to WiFi / Wireless