IFTF's Future Now: Ad-Supported Municipal Wireless Networks and the Future of Cities: Three Issues Missing From the Current Debate:

location based services

"This just sort of fell out of my head this afternoon... my response to a lot of these municpal wireless projects has finally congealed in a somewhat conherent form.

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Ad-Supported Municipal Wireless Networks and the Future of Cities: Three Issues Missing From the Current Debate

Anthony Townsend
Research Director
Technology Horizons Program
Institute for the Future
Palo Alto, California
http://www.iftf.org

From Philadelphia to San Francisco to Portland, plans for municipal wireless networks are on the drawing board in hundreds of cities across America. These ambitious projects are driven by both push and pull forces. On the push side, Wi-Fi technology has rewritten the economics of deploying broadband access in densely built cities. What used to require tearing up streets and deploying costly cables now can be achieved my mounting antennas on street lamps every hundred yards or so. On the pull side, minority communities and small businesses that have been bypassed by DSL and digital cable buildout are mobilizing and demanding equal access to the vital economic lifeline that broadband networks represent.

While the speed with which local governments are moving to exploit this opportunity is admirable, IFTF’s research has identified several areas where in"