Traffic, Medical Applications Spark Tucson Digital City: Q&A with Francisco Leyva By Peter Orne  Wireless Government

Similar to the automated-meter-reading story in Corpus Christi, Tucson’s broadband-wireless planning began with an effort to tackle a municipal chore—traffic-signal monitoring—more efficiently and cost effectively, while opening the way for more Wi-Fi-mesh-enabled applications such video streaming on ambulances. Tucson’s project manager provides an update on this emerging digital city. More

The City of Santa Cruz has been participating as a partner in the Wireless Silicon Valley (WSV) project, which will provide outdoor wireless data access in the counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo, and in parts of Santa Cruz County. For the last several months the Silicon Valley Metro Connect team (a consortium of Azulstar, IBM, Cisco, and others) has been lining up financing for the construction of the network. That process is now complete and work has resumed on the negotiation of the legal agreements. Those agreements include:

Model Agreement: The majority of the agreement has been vetted by both sides. The Executive Committee (a small group of managers from other cities and Joint Venture) is now incorporating critical details such as specific services that will be provided, pricing, privacy policy, terms for use of city-owned mounting assets, and so forth.

Enhanced Services Agreement: A first draft is nearing completion. This agreement will provide details and prices for city and county-specific services. Joint Powers Authority: A draft has been reviewed by the cities and their comments incorporated into a new version. The Executive Committee will provide this agreement to the members with the other agreements. WSV Concept Cities: The cities of San Carlos and Palo Alto have approved the construction of one square mile test networks. Engineering work has begun. The cities are now waiting for requests for permits to use city-owned mounting assets. WSV Users Groups: Our first users group, the Wireless Transportation Systems Users Group, held its first meeting on April 4th. Members include Volkswagen, Daimler-Chrysler, Toyota, BMW, CalTrans, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, IBM, Cisco, and SAP. The group developed a charter and laid the groundwork for selecting its first projects at the next meeting. Current Schedule: The Executive Committee has developed a tentative schedule for the completion of the legal agreements. The schedule calls for delivering draft documents to the members on or about April 30. Member comments will be incorporated and the document will be finalized during May, delivering the final version around June 7th. If this schedule is met, staff will bring the agreements forward for Council consideration in June. If the agreements are approved then, it is possible that WSV services would be available to residents in 2008.

Published electronically every Thursday, the W2i Government Broadband Wireless Report (The W2i Report) explores the issues surrounding the planning and implementation of broadband-wireless infrastructures, applications and services for cities, communities and regions. The W2i Report features commentaries and interviews with CIOs, wireless field practitioners, industry experts, and local-government association leaders, as well as a dozen independent bloggers. It includes data bases on leading case studies, business opportunities (RFPs) and headlines. All broadband-wireless stakeholders — from local-government officials and IT managers to the ecosystem of equipment and application vendors and systems integrators — are encouraged to subscribe.