Michael Paddock Funding Wireless Subscribe to Newsletter Tell a Friend Print this Page 08/23/2007 Funding for Broadband-Wireless Communities Although the move to truly wireless communities seems a recent phenomenon of the past few years, public-sector wireless projects have been in the offing since the invention of the radio. In recent memory, early forays into wireless were funded by federal grant programs, from pure research out of the National Science Foundation to a variety of applications supported by the NTIA Technology and Infrastructure Assistance Program, and later the Technology Opportunities Program. We have the COPS MORE and National Criminal History Improvement programs to thank for enabling Wi-Fi access to data from police cruisers. Today, interoperability funding has become the mode of communications grants, and the USAC E-Rate program brings wireless to schools and libraries across the country. Homeland-security funding—from DHS, HHS, or others—has also become a major source of support for wireless in local-government, education, and healthcare arenas. All these programs, old and new, do share one important premise: Grants are predicated on function, not on technology. More than a billion dollars will be expended on wireless this year alone, and even the technology-specific grants exist to solve a particular problem or deal with a specific issue. They leave it largely to applicants to decide and justify whether and how much technology to apply to addressing the issue that is the focus of the program. Of course, those programs that support the purchase of a specific application will fund the infrastructure, including wireless infrastructure, that the application travels on. So what does that mean for communities seeking funds for broadscale infrastructure projects? Although it may be tempting to build wireless capacity and wait for public-sector applications to appear, tailoring funding proposals around your application needs is much more likely to attract grant dollars for your wireless community. Identifying relevant applications and building collaborative approaches to deploying those technologies before (or as soon as possible after) building the infrastructure is the best way to maximize the federal, state, and even private-sector support that may be available to the project. Awareness of current and future funding sources that can pay for wireless applications in your community is also critical. Grants come from a range of agencies in a variety of formats throughout the year. Coordinating these funds can be tricky, especially because many are competitive, and others may require agreements be in place with other agencies in the region. In the coming weeks and months, my blog space here on W2i.com will review the most prominent funding sources for wireless applications and provide tips and ideas to make you more successful at obtaining funds for your projects. To round out the discussion, we will explore the needs of public-sector agencies as they move toward a wireless buildout. Juxtaposing the proactive requirements of leading-edge communities in urban, suburban and rural settings with the available programs will help to identify gaps in funding. These gaps can fuel your own advocacy efforts or, at the very least, keep you from spinning your wheels looking for a program that doesn’t exist. If there is a particular grant program you feel has helped you build your wireless community or you would like to see a specific topic covered, just insert a comment at the bottom of my blog, or e-mail me at mpaddock@grantsoffice.com, with “Funding Wireless” in the subject line. back Related Items: • Cincinnati Readies for Wi-Fi • New DHS Interoperable Emergency Communications Grants Support Community-Wide Efforts Comments No records were found. Post new comment: Only registered users can add comments. Please Log-in

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