Toronto Hydro Telecom “has announced”:1 that they will be installing a municipal wireless network throughout Toronto. This will make Toronto the largest municipal wireless effort in Canada, and is similar to similar efforts in Philadelphia and San Francisco. One of the interesting aspects of the project is how Toronto Hydro Telecom became a proponent of muni-wireless:
bq. In Ontario, where smart meters have been mandated, electrical utilities are looking at various telecommunications technologies for retrieving data from people’s homes and businesses for time-of-day billing purposes.
bq. Sources say Toronto Hydro has decided to support its smart meter plan using Wi-Fi technology, which can be accessed by any properly equipped laptop or handheld computing device.
bq. Brian Sharwood, a telecom analyst with the Seaboard Group in Toronto, said it makes sense for a utility to recoup the cost of supporting smart meters by also selling wireless broadband services. “In a way that’s the excuse to do all of this,” he said. “You’re going to run it past a lot of people anyway.”
bq. …
bq. But municipalities argue that competition is healthy and that blanketing communities with low-cost broadband access helps bridge the digital divide.
[1]http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1141643034143&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home
Filed under: International, Muniwireless, News, Policy
