« Banana breakfast! | Main | What's the real recipe for destruction? »

WiFi in rural Oregon

An AP article (linked here from Wired News) notes Fred Ziari's rural wifi project in Oregon, saying that he drew none of the resistance we've been seeing to municipal wifi projects. This piece suggests that's because it's a rural project where phone companies see little profit potential. This isn't exactly a correct interpretation, though: the big telcos have opposed urban wifi projects, not because they're urban, but because they're operated by municipal governments, which they see as unfair competition. In Texas, the telcos have seemed just as interested in protecting whatever potential there might be for them to offer rural broadband services in the future.

What's great about Ziari's project is that he's doing it - he's figured out how to blanket a large rural area, which can be difficult, and he's succeeding partly because he was smart enough to contract with cities and counties to provide funds, and this has worked because he's pitched the various innovative ways they can benefit from pervasive broadband.

"Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education," said Ziari, who immigrated to the United States from the tiny Iranian town of Shahi on the Caspian Sea.

jon posted this at 7:55 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky