Twin Cities suburbs get Wi-Fi without fuss: Frontier Communications is reportedly building out a Wi-Fi network across several towns around Minneapolis and St. Paul without the cities involved issuing RFPs. Frontier offers DSL service in some of those areas, and charges $50 per month for 3 Mbps downstream; their Wi-Fi service will be rated at 1.5 Mbps and pricing hasn't been announced. Frontier is Minnesota's second-largest telephone company, after Qwest. This article notes that most cities are served by one telecom firm, but the town of Burnsville is split between Qwest and Frontier.

Vancouver plans expansion of free, public Wi-Fi: The city will extend service to City Hall, a community center, and other locations. Service is already available in Esther Short Park, where they revamped the offering last year with the help of firms like HP and Electric Lightwave. Portland, Ore., across the Columbia River from Vancouver, put an option in its contract with MetroFi, this story says, that would allow neighboring communities to get the same terms as Portland without separate negotiations--but there's no plan, as yet, for the Portland network to expand. It's under construction

Caltrain looks to funding for Wi-Fi on commuter rail: Caltrain's board may add $1m to fund the startup costs of putting Internet access via Wi-Fi on its 96 trains. As with other rail-Fi projects--which I surveyed in September in The Economist--the idea is to add services that move people from cars into trains because they're convinced they can either get more done (productivity) or have a better time (entertainment). Or some combination of both. The $1m would cover design and engineering costs, but not deployment.

PC World Canada rounds up projects in the Great North: Fredericton was the early entrant with its Fred-e-Zone, and Calgary is an early rejecter stating it won't ever install Wi-Fi (at least with municipal dollars).