Subject: [NEXTEL-1] City sets up wireless as lifeline

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 04:29:50 -0400

-------- Original Message --------
From: [email-masked]
Subject: City sets up wireless as lifeline
 
City sets up wireless as lifeline

http://www.fcw.com/geb/articles/2003/0421/web-winston-04-21-03.asp

BY Brian Robinson 
April 21, 2003

After spending millions of dollars to develop the downtown commercial area of 
Winston-Salem, officials in the North Carolina city are setting up free 
wireless service to serve as a technology hook to attract young professionals 
and help the area thrive.

The new Wi-Fi system, which uses the Institute of Electrical and Electronic 
Engineers 802.11b wireless local-area network protocol, should be operating 
within the next three months. It uses several Cisco Systems Inc. Aironet 350 
wireless base stations hooked into an existing fiber-optic network to provide 
wireless access along the city's Fourth Street downtown hub.

The aim is to encourage people to come downtown and dine at sidewalk 
restaurants and cafes, knowing they can have continuous and free access to the 
Internet for laptops and personal digital assistants, said Dennis Newman, 
Winston-Salem's chief information officer.

There was no intensive study done before making the decision.
"It's an idea we had and we just went off and did it," he said. "It was by far 
the easiest sale we've made [for an IT venture]. People in government 
understood this was a minimal risk from an investment point of view and that it 
was being applied directly to the base we are hoping to attract."

However, he said, the low cost of installing the wireless system stems from the 
fact that the fiber backbone was already in place. It was then simply a matter 
of getting the city's Internet service provider to route access to the wireless 
system. The city also has the necessary information technology expertise in-
house to manage the whole thing, Newman said.

It's possible that similar wireless access could be provided for other parts of 
the city.

"We've certainly had the requests," Newman said. "But it depends on where we 
feel we can make the best use of limited funds. We'll wait and see how this 
Fourth Street project goes first."

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