WiFi as a means to offer Muni-"over the air" applications? Cablevision is banking on it.

A recent study conducted by the Dell 'Oro Group believes Cablevision's recent increase in subscribers is mostly attributed to the cable company's roll out of WiFi in its service area. Cablevision reported a more than 70% growth in subscribers during the fourth quarter. This equates to the largest growth for any cable operator in the US during that time period.

"Cablevision's Optimum WiFi service is rekindling interest in municipal WiFi applications among other large service providers," said Ben Kwan, who is analyst of wireless LAN research at Dell'Oro. "For this and other reasons, we believe municipal WiFi applications will become an increasingly important growth driver for the service provider mesh market in 2009."

The more free WiFi the better--but the key word here is Free. As it stands, Cablevision offers its Optimum WiFi service free to its subscribers only. It would be hard to reconcile in the minds of tax payers that tax dollars are going into supporting a private company in which the only way they are allowed to get "FREE" WiFi is to be a PAID subscriber. Outside of gaining more subs, Cablevision is hoping to "double dip" with the installed networks in order to provide services to the Muni's. The implications of having Muni-over the air applications running on a private networks would also imply that as the company goes, so does the municipality. A municipal WiFI should be about empowering the end-users and the muni becoming more independent of private sector.

The ideal solution would be to balance the use of the private sectors data networks (back hauls) and the public sectors implementation of SaaS solution like the one provided by Meraki Networks.

Steve Amarante
Sky-Packets
www.sky-packets.com
1+888.850.0245
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