The Impact Of Roadside Wireless

A very interesting discussion over at eWeek about plans in Europe to set up a wireless network along roadsides, by making use of the real estate of streets signs, lampposts, and traffic lights to put up wireless routers everywhere. The initial project is being designed to help with road and travel info. Such a system would let governments monitor road use, and allow for instant reporting (even from car to car) as accidents happened, so that traffic could be better routed. However, that's only the starting point. As the article suggests, such a system would only need a small percentage of the bandwidth available to it - and the rest could easily be offered to everyone else as a wide area broadband wireless offering. The article doesn't fully explain the technology involved - and it does raise some questions (for example, it says the technology won't be good enough for VoIP, but it's not clear why not) - but overall, suggests that even more wireless bandwidth may be coming from unexpected sources.

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