Last month Houston signed up with Earthlink to build a citywide, 640-square-mile WiFi cloud. Houston’s WiFi network will dwarf the 52-square-mile Wi-Fi network in Taipei, Taiwan, says Rice University in a valiant attempt to conquer the top spot.
But there are many networks built and planned that dwarf Houston’s 600 square mile cloud.
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Russia’s Golden Telecom in Moscow claims its network is the second largest in the world, with 6,700 mesh access nodes covering 800,000 households. Nortel’s Wireless Mesh Network solution is used to provide wireless LANs in areas where it is difficult or cost prohibitive to run cables.
- Nortel’s Wireless Mesh solution is also used in Taipei’s Mobile City project (M-City). Taipei plans to have 10,000 mesh access points installed across 90 percent of its 272 square kilometers to provide seamless, high-speed wireless roaming for residents. Nortel’s Meshed WiFi routers.
- Singapore expects to have their 270 square mile city-wide Wi-Fi cloud finished by the end of 2008 and the entire city, indoors and out, blanketed by 2015.
- Three planned statewide broadand wireless networks in the United States include the states of South Carolina (31,000 square miles, right), Vermont (9,249 square miles), and Rhode Island (1,044 square miles).
Several huge regional broadband wireless networks have been built or are planned, including:
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The 700 square mile cloud, built by EZ Wireless several years ago in Eastern Oregon, covers four counties and seven cities.
- A 720-square-mile Wi-Fi zone in Michigan is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Wireless Washtenaw will mixing and matching of 802.11b/g in urban Ann Arbor and 802.11a in the 600-square-mile rural area of Washtenaw County.
- Wireless Silicon Valley in California, gathers 41 cities together to deploy a wireless network that will cover nine counties over a 12,000-square-mile area, including Sacramento County, and over 30 municipalities with a combined population of about 3 million, including the city of Sacramento (pop: 450,000).
- Ten Colorado cities are creating a vast wireless broadband network for residents, businesses and visitors. The anticipated project deployment is the Fall of 2007.
- Just south of Seattle, the Pierce County Wi-Fi network plans a 1,500 square mile broadband wireless network. The Rainier Communications Commission, a countywide consortium of municipalities, voted to give a contract to CenturyTel to provide WiFi service to Pierce County’s 754,000 residents.
This is not to take anything away from Houston’s planned 600 square mile city cloud — it should be the largest city-wide municipal wireless cloud in the United States.
Rice University says their own Pecan Park cloud, in a working-class eastside neighborhood, is being built with the help of the non-profit Technology For All (TFA) can be a model for others.
“No one has anything like this,” said Rice electrical engineering professor Ed Knightly. “We’ve got ultra high-density usage. Our user densities are higher than anything I’ve heard about anywhere in the world. We just celebrated our 2,000th user joining TFA Wireless,” Knightly said. “Our user density is more than 650 per square kilometer right now, and the goal is to get that up to 1,000.”
Some 18 nodes have been installed since 2004 and they expect to complete the network with about least eight more over the next year. Once finished, TFA Wireless will cover about four square miles of Pecan Park. They are designing an architecture that is based on Transit Access Points (TAPs), devices that form a wireless backbone mesh via high-performance multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless links.
“Europe’s densest, most comprehensive citywide Wi-Fi network” was built by The Cloud and the City of London Corporation. It serves more than 350,000 people who work in and visit the 1 square mile area known as The City. It uses 127 BelAir nodes to provide 95% coverage of the region.
Related DailyWireless articles include; National Broadband Wireless Projects, The World’s Largest WiFi Cloud, State-wide Wireless Broadband Access, South Carolina Statewide Wireless, Vermont Statewide Wireless, Rhode Island Statewide Wireless, Wireless SiValley: Mix & Match, Ten Cities Under Colorado Cloud, Washington’s 1500mi Cloud, Sacramento Regional Cloud, Cloud for Silicon Valley, Intelligent Communities of the Year, St. Louis County Cloud, Airspan WiMAXes Australia, Singapore Cloud and Intelligent Nation.
