Wireless broadband, communities, and the shape of things to come (original) (raw)

2006, Government Information Quarterly

As electronic communications environments become the fabric of our lives, the quality and range of network connectivity increasingly determine what we can do and how we do it. This issue of Government Information Quarterly examines wireless broadband services and the arrangements municipalities have created to nurture or manage them. Its point of departure is the broad presumption that high capacity networks are not only desirable but also increasingly necessary for numerous businesses and services. The reach and economies offered by wireless make it a core element of the 2007 nationwide broadband availability goal President Bush announced in 2004, and a parallel goal announced in Canada even earlier (Bush, 2004; Government of Canada, 2003). Several other countries around the globe are actively investing in the creation of both wireline and wireless broadband networks. At this writing, few major cities in North America have not examined alternatives for enhancing wireless broadband access in their environs. Even as the empirical evidence materializes regarding precisely what broadband means to the economy, so many educational, industrial, and government-related (including health services) processes assume easy access to broadband that to claim it is "not essential" is analogous to turning one's back on most of the productivity improvements as well as many of the core cultural and social developments of the past decade (National Research Council, 2002). When pervasiveness and mobile access are added to that framework, the significance of wireless networksspecifically broadband wireless networksseems clear. The wireless, or WiFi (wireless fidelity), revolution of the late 1990s and early 2000s has catalyzed a new vision of cheap, widespread, and easy access to the Internet. A sister service called, "WiMax," which would extend wireless signals up to 30 miles from a source (compared to WiFi's 300 feet range), similarly promises low cost access to the Internet and is especially attractive for more rural regions, although both WiFi and WiMax have limitations in terms of security and handling interference. Operating in unlicensed spectrum in the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands, and inclusive of several technologies meeting IEEE 802.11 standards, WiFi offers yet another option for people to connect to the Internet beyond the landline-based