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New Orleans: making plans to extend its Mesh WiFi when the Emergency expires

The New Orleans city-wide WiFi, originally installed to reduce crime, is now planning to extend its "free Internet" service beyond the end of the emergency regulations that made it possible.

The State of Louisiana actually has an ordinance forbidding free Internet provision, but Chris Drake, project director of the mayor's office of technology in New Orleans, told NewsWireless today that it was too good to stop.

"It was fun to build," he said, "and we are definitely looking hard at how to deal with the LA anti-muni WiFi law, and how we deal with that after we come out of the State of Emergency some time next year or so."

Earlier reports that all the hardware for the Mesh network was donated are not quite right, said Drake. "Only the first 75 units were donated to get us going," he told NewsWireless. "We are buying them after that, so the subsidised build out is not that big an advantage."

The financing of the network isn't his main problem, it seems. "The bigger issue is the slow pace of rebuild that the incumbent telcos have demonstrated," Drake offered. "I'm not faulting them, because they have a huge legacy network to support. But we're not letting it stop us either. We have to have something for our City agencies and the public to use for comms."

Speaking to SearchNetworking earlier, Drake said the city is using an 802.11b wireless mesh network from http://www.tropos.com/ Tropos Networks of Sunnyvale, Calif., to deploy WiFi across high crime neighbourhoods. That project started long before the hurricane struck, in January 2004 and "in the space of six months, the neighbourhood's murder rate was down 57% and auto thefts were down 30%," reported Jim Rendon.

Crime prevention by WiFi from SearchNetworking

Earlier news about the free network, at NewsWireless

Also see: New Orleans, WiFi, hotspots