The city-wide Wi-Fi network is becoming a ubiquitous part of village, town, city, county, and state planning: A couple of years ago, I faced the dilemma of seeing stories in local newspapers nearly every day about Wi-Fi, typically because a cafe had added Wi-Fi or a hotspot network had installed service in several coffeeshops, bookstores, or other locales (especially a local airport). This news was so frequent I introduced the Who's Hot Today rubric, a category for rounding up this smaller news that was still worth linking to.

Then Philadelphia and San Francisco's city-wide projects came along, and the flood of "Cafe Nervosa has Wi-Fi" tuned into "Frostbite Falls considers Wi-Fi for entire town." Now, there are a daily flood of stories about city council meetings, contract negotiations, and trial projects, along with editorials suggesting or condemning plans--and stories about actual networks being finalized and mounted. For instance, just today Sioux Falls, South Dakota's paper talks about whether the city should get some fires going and how; and Mount Clemens, Mich., is looking for a Macomb County service to get running in its downtown by year's end.

In the interest of not overwhelming you loyal readers, I've been tending to limit my "Metro Round-Ups" (which themselves have morphed from "Muni Round-Ups" as more involves private and private/public partnerships) to stories I find and interviews I conduct about networks that involve the largest cities or areas, or that involve actual deployments of some scale. I throw in stories of interest that cover unique networks or business models, or that have enough quirkiness to be of interest.

All this to say--the subject has grown large enough to need winnowing yet again!