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My takeways from last night's Women in Telecommunications panel, "Wireless Broadband: Technologies for the last mile."

SkyPilot Logo

Linda Kalcic, VP of Corporate Marketing @ Sky Pilot Networks: There are many different deployment and business models among the hundreds of communities deploying municipal wi-fi. However, there seems to be a clear trend away from municipalities building, deploying and maintaining their own systems toward public-private partnerships, like San Francisco's proposed municipal wi-fi system. The real challenge lies in bridging the last mile to rural communities, where there often is a large market opportunity for an angel sponsor like Google to step in and help foot the bill.

Meraki Logo

Sanjit Biswas, CEO of Meraki used the Westside Courts to demonstrate how his products are connecting underserved communities. This was a project sponsored by CTFC. Miraki is going nuts, having already shipped thousands of units all over the world after only being in existence for 9 months and not even having a website for the first 6.  There's a cool project in San Francisco to bring free wireless internet access to the city.

Emy Tseng, Project Director, Digital Inclusion Programs in the SF Mayor's office and former CTFC staffer spoke on how all these technologies help promote digital inclusion and the importance of community involvement in helping to get systems deployed.

Alvarion Logo

Finally, my favorite quote of the night. Apparently an old saw in the Telco sector from the speaker from Alvarion:

"Fiber to the home is a great future technology. And always will be."