Good news for our brothers in the Bay. The Metro Connect consortium, which includes Cisco and IBM, got the winning bid to provide WiFi to the entire Silicon Valley. Each city in the valley needs to approve the contracts, but Metro Connect is privately owned and plan to operate through sponsorships, not through money from each city.
What’s also interesting is that Internet VoIP calls will be charged extra, no doubt to not compete with current phone companies. A competing group, the Wireless Silicon Valley Task Force, which is made of local government officials and utility companies’ representatives, have a competing plan to cover all areas from San Francisco down to Santa Cruz. We’ll see how Google will fit into this plan.
Silicon Valley Wireless Project Moves On [NYTimes]