Only a month to go before the first Municipal Wireless Conference. Among the speakers lined up by organiser Esme Vos are Jonathan Baltuch, founder of a firm called MRI which creates economic development blueprints for municipalities; James Farstad, consultant to the city of Minneapolis’ citywide wireless project; Greg Richardson of Civitium, a company that helps municipalities develop digital communities; and Sascha Meinrath, an internationally renowned expert on Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) and a leading figure in CTCNet, a network of more than 1000 organizations united in their commitment to improve the educational, economic, cultural and political life of their communities through technology. I particularly like the offer of a pre-conference reality bus tour of a wifi network. Few things sound as intangible to me as a wireless network, but MetroFi Network in Santa Clara is taking people on a behind-the-scenes look at the largest deployment in the U.S of a WiFi network. You get to check out some of their 200 second-generation WiFi nodes, visit one of MetroFi’s roof-top locations, peer at pole-top radios, and a watch a demo of MetroFi’s proprietary “zero touch provisioning” of the customer’s WiFi modem. (No, I don’t know what that means; you tell me when you get back from the bus trip).
