Related Stories"All my geek friends who bought the iPhone are standing on the corner saying, 'I wish I could use my Google Maps, but the AT&T network is crap,'" Vos told me. "I think the iPhone changed everything."
What many cities are learning is that they are deploying this fast technology a little too quickly, which is how "the press-release driven network" is born, Settles says. "It doesn't matter if you're first, it matters if you have an actual decent working network with a sound business plan behind it," Settles says.
The best advice to cities looking to embrace Wi-Fi may be to watch the example of others trying to deploy it now and observe the results. If providers like EarthLink can circumvent the pitfalls analysts describe, municipal Wi-Fi could grow to be as big as the EarthLink VP suggests:
"We're in the very early stages of an industry that's going to be huge. This is a brand new technology -- no one's ever used Wi-Fi meshes at this scale before, and we've only been doing it for about a year."
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