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.
The worldwide external enterprise storage systems market reached a key point in the first quarter of 2026, and the implications for organizations running Applied-AI initiatives are impossible to ignore. IDC's latest market study reveals that systems grew 22.7 percent year-over-year to $9.2 billion, a dramatic acceleration from the 3.9 percent full-year 2025 growth rate. For enterprise leaders who have spent the past two years prioritizing GPU clusters and server infrastructure while treating storage as a secondary consideration, this data should serve as actionable guidance. The storage bottleneck in AI deployment is no longer theoretical, and the market dynamics now unfolding will directly shape the cost, timeline, and architectural viability of AI programs through at least 2027. Storage Systems Market Development The first quarter of 2026 produced several milestones that demand the attention of any organization with active or planned AI infrastructure investments. All Flash Array...