Oakland's airport: The Oakland, Calif., airport finally has full terminal coverage for its 14 million annual passengers. The airport has long had limited Wi-Fi through a grandfathered agreement with a Laptop Lanes location sold years ago to Wayport. This new network is operated by Sprint.
Cook County, Ill., unwires for public safety: The county will use IBM Global Services to cover the county and 128 municipalities within it. The folks at Wireless Week quote an IBM'er suggesting Cook would be the first county with total coverage, but I believe that Oklahoma and New Mexico might have beaten them--depends on your definition of full coverage across a county. The system will be used by policy and emergency vehicles and will ultimately provide a common service across political entities. The frequencies used aren't mentioned. I hope it's 4.9 GHz, not 2.4 GHz.
Why 4.9Ghz ? Have not heard anything good about this new Public Safety Spectrum. Most vendors have committed to deploying this with their Mesh systems but do not feel it will add real value to any Police/Fire and or EMS other than it being Licensed (reducing interference) . Appears to have limited capacity and will have major issues with penetrating foliage. Looks to me that it will be used primarily as a backhaul radio supporting a Unlicensed 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless Mesh.
Mesh vendors as well as the Wireless Gateway back office operations providers think that they can offer the secure access/privacy with their packages to handle most Public Safety needs. Plus there is signinficant cost saving using existing Customer Access Devices (CAD's)in Laptops, PDA and emerging smartphones.