Wireless Future Program: Latest Publications

No starter pistol announces the beginning of a new technological era.[1] There are no cannon blasts or tower bells ringing forth the end of the old and dawn of the new.

Barack Obama has said we need a "Google for government." It's a nice line, but what does it mean? Federal agencies have been online since the mid-'90s. Obama's first crack at a Google-for-government law led to USAspending.gov, a budget tracker that looked like everything else the feds had put up on the Web--until I saw one geek-speak phrase on the home page, so small I almost missed it: API Documentation. To understand its significance, let me tell you how I got subway schedules on… more

We live in a civil society - a place where primary education is freely available to all, where anyone can enjoy a walk through our public parks or down our sidewalks and freely drive through the streets. Libraries across the country loan out books for free - literature that you can read on a spring day in our parks or beneath the streetlights on main street on a warm summer's evening. You don't have to tip the firemen who show up at your house or pay… more

As the saying goes: Reports of the death of municipal wireless are greatly exaggerated. Most mainstream media simply got it wrong. Most municipal wireless networks across the United States didn't take a tumble over the past year. Rather, in high-profile cities where deals fell apart - including Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco and Houston - what failed were exclusive commercial franchise forays.  Local governments were not going to finance, own or operate their respective networks. These weren't municipal networks at all.