The Portland Business Journal has another long article about the city of Portland’s plans to attract Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi companies: The Portland Telecommunications Steering Committee, a group of city government and business leaders pushing Wi-Fi in Portland, hope that a Wi-Fi cloud will cover not just downtown but the outlying suburbs. An Intel exec is part of the group and Nigel Ballard hopes that Intel Capital might encourage some of the wireless startups it funds to relocate to Portland.
Portland has been really ambitious in its encouragement of Wi-Fi and I hope it spells success for the city. In typical Portland fashion, the leaders hope to use Wi-Fi to bring more business to the city but only as far as that can benefit citizens--the leaders almost always talk about ensuring some degree of free access on the Wi-Fi networks.