Municipal wireless network

Municipal wireless network (Municipal Wi-Fi, Muni Wi-Fi or Muni-Fi) is the concept of turning an entire city into a Wireless Access Zone (WAZ), with the ultimate goal of making wireless access to the Internet a universal service. This is usually done by providing municipal broadband via Wi-Fi to large parts or all of a municipal area by deploying a wireless mesh network. The typical deployment design uses hundreds of routers deployed outdoors, often on utility poles. The operator of the network acts as a wireless internet service provider.

Overview
Such networks go far beyond the existing piggybacking opportunities available near public libraries and some coffee shops. The basic premise of carpeting an area with wireless service in urban centers is that it is more economical to the community to provide the service as a utility rather than to have individual households and businesses pay private firms for such a service. Such networks are viewed as capable of enhancing city management and public safety, especially when used directly by city employees out in the field. They can also be viewed as a social service to those who cannot afford private high-speed services such as DSL. When the network service is free and a small number of clients consume a majority of the available capacity, operating and regulating the network might prove difficult.The US Federal Trade Commission has expressed some concerns about such private/public partnerships as trending towards a franchise monopoly.[Technology continues to advance. In 2007, companies with existing cell sites offered competing paid high-speed wireless services where the laptop owner purchased a PC card or adapter which uses communications based on EV-DO cellular data receivers or WiMAX rather than 802.11b/g. High-end laptops in 2007 feature built-in support for these newer protocols. The next generation of Intel Centrino will support dual Wi-Fi and WiMAX. WiMAX is designed to implement a metropolitan area network (MAN) while 802.11 is designed to implement a wireless local area network (LAN).
The USA continues to be laissez-faire on technology and innovation. For the USA, providing a municipal wireless network is not officially recognized as a priority. There is no national program, plan or deployment model, which is a nice way of saying that everything is sheer chaos. The economies of an essentially socialist approach to providing a default level of access are easy to recognize, much as with cable television, but success in deployment effort in the USA are uneven largely due to regulatory and cost-sharing issues, with results akin to the shotgun sequencing of genomes