Sacramento starts test phase of municipal wireless build-out: The City Hall and Cesar Chavez Plaza will be a testbed for MobilePro Corp., which won a contract to build a test that would--if successful--lead to a 60-square-mile network. The network would serve public safety, municipal worker, and public access purposes. MobilePro will self-fund the project, which is essentially a franchise arrangement that requires two hours of free access per user per day, and 2,000 city accounts. Pete Sessions, the Congressman from SBC/AT&T, is mentioned without the critical fact of his non-blind SBC stock ownership and his wife's job at SBC.
Pretoria plans muni buildout: South Africa will liberate municipalities from the monopoly PTT after the unanimous passage in parliament of The Electronic Communications Bill. The town of Tshwane wants to offer every resident an email address and broadband access by 2010. Very few municipalities are applying for the licenses that would allow them to run telecom/data businesses. Philadelphia is cited as a shining example of public/private partnerships at the end of this piece.