Craig Settles, the Summit Chairperson, author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless and industry consultant, met with many of the 200 officials and staff from local and regional government. He offers these conclusions based on their Summit feedback:
-- Local governments' collective understanding of, and interest in, muni wireless is at the level of their U.S. counterparts in early 2006.
-- While digital inclusion is important in some areas, many officials see the networks' potential to reduce costs in government operations as a major justification for these initiatives.
-- Some Canadian cities show real creativity at financing networks that U.S. cities should study, with Fredericton, New Brunswick using one particularly noteworthy business model. Vancouver has the opportunity, should it so choose, to use the 2008 Winter Olympics to prove out the value of soliciting corporate sponsorships to underwrite large portions of these network costs.
-- Together with one-number portability that begins tomorrow, municipal networks combined with voice over IP (VoIP) should exert significant pressure to force price and service changes by incumbent telcos that benefit consumers.
-- The June Wireless Cities Innovations Forum in Vancouver should see an even greater level of interest and more projects being launched by attending governments.
Mr. Settles lays out key issues and predictions of muni wireless developments in this podcast from the Summit -- http://www.roamad.com/roamad/node/86. CA-based, Mr. Settles is president of Successful.com, a wireless strategy consulting firm.
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Photo of Toronto skyline by Hobvias Sudoneighm. Creative Comons License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0
