rural

Location(s)

The Umatilla county network is a rural, county-wide wireless network. The initial motivation for the network came from the need for a system to notify emergency responders and residents in case of a poisonous gas plume coming from a nearby U.S. Army depot, where chemical weapons are incinerated. Research for the network begin in 2002, the network went live with CSEPP (Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program) in 2004, and public safety and other applications were deployed shortly after that. The network is privately owned and operated by EZ Wireless; the municipalities are network tenants. The network has improved local connectivity, because before the network was built only dial-up service was available to county residents.

Learn More:

Rural Wireless: Umatilla County built a network for an application it doesn't want to deploy…and now uses it for everything else. Mike Perkowski. Muniwireless Magazine, March 2007, p. 28-34. http://www.muniwireless.com/reports/MW005.pdf

Wi-Fi Brings Broadband to Rural Washington. Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service. August 23, 2004.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/23/HNwifiwash_1.html

Zhang, Mingliu and Richard Wolff (2004). Using WiFi for Cost-Effective Broadband Wireless Access in Rural and Remote Areas. Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, 2004. IEEE. Volume 3, Issue 21-25, March 2004: 1347 – 1352. http://www.coe.montana.edu/ee/rwolff/WCNC-%20conf-final.pdf

Communication networks and services have not reached either the poor or the rural people of Latin America and the Caribbean. The conventional answer to this problem had been to offer public subsidies to incumbent operators to cover the difference between tariffs and cost-recovery levels.

Oram, Andy (2007). MuniWireless conference: city politicians need to understand the lay of the LAN. O’Reilly Emerging Telephony, June 4, 2007.

USDA Rural Development Community Connect Grant Program
http://www.usda.gov/rus/telecom/commconnect.htm

Perkowski, Mike (2007): Rural Wireless: Umatilla County built a network for an application it doesn't want to deploy…and now uses it for everything else. Muniwireless Magazine, March 2007, p. 28-34. http://www.muniwireless.com/reports/MW005.pdf

K-Net
http://www.services.knet.ca/network.html
K-Net is an example of a remote, regional broadband network. It
provides broadband connectivity between 20 remote First Nations in
Northern Ontario, other major centers across the province, and across
Canada. K-Net works in partnership with First Nations, the public and
the private sectors. The long-term objective of the organization is to
establish local community networks linked across the country to other
networks that share and distribute broadband services and programs that