People looking to relocate or planning a sight-seeing trip to a metro area may be adding another item to their checklists: Does the city offer wireless access? -- Increasingly, the answer will be yes. This month, San Francisco and New Haven, CT became the two latest major U.S. urban areas to take another step toward providing Wi-Fi connections. They've submitted requests for proposals from technology companies and hired consultants. And Philadelphia -- the first major urban area to initiate a city government-led wireless program -- just announced that it has narrowed its search for an Internet provider to two finalists: Earthlink and Hewlett-Packard. The service will be rolled out in "mid-October," according to Dianah Neff, CIO of the city of Philadelphia. Indeed, approximately 300 U.S. cities and municipalities are now in various stages of wireless rollouts -- up from barely any just a year and a half ago. Greg Richardson, founder of Civitium, an Atlanta-based organization that assists cities in their Wi-Fi efforts, sometimes uses the word "crazy" to describe this phenomenon.
Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is quietly becoming one of the most strategic short-range wireless technologies in the market, moving from niche deployments into the mainstream of smartphones, cars, and smart spaces. As the ecosystem matures and next-generation implementations arrive, UWB is shifting from nice-to-have to a foundational capability for secure access, sensing, and high-performance device-to-device connectivity. UWB Technology Market Development Unlike Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, or legacy IEEE 802.15.4 implementations, UWB combines three powerful attributes in a single radio: secure ranging, radar-like sensing, and low-latency, high-throughput short-range data. This allows networking and IT vendors to architect experiences that blend precise location, context awareness, and rich interaction in ways traditional connectivity stacks cannot easily match. According to the latest worldwide market study by ABI Research, UWB is expected to be one of the fastest-growing wireless connectivity...