The Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network plans to connect the entire San Francisco Bay area in California in a wide-area wireless network. The organization, a consortium run by businesspeople, government officials, non-profit organization executives, and members of the academe, will be utilizing this network for various services ranging from consumer access to the Internet to sensing operations for municipal projects.

Detailed plans are still unavailable as of the moment, but there is indication that chipmaker Intel intends to lead the outdoor WiFi network initiative. Intel is reported to have committed shouldering—in kind through Intel Solution Services—a third of the US$ 60,000 cost of preparing the request for proposal (RFP) for the issuance of bids.

To cover for the rest of the costs of preparing the RFP, Joint Venture Silicon Valley is also soliciting contributions from local governments, particularly those covered by the planned WiFi network. Completion of the document is targeted by April of this year.

The network’s coverage, spanning 1,500 square miles, seems an ambitious goal for a WiFi network, especially since the prevailing technologies are not designed for wide area coverage. However, the group is considering the use of a mix of new and existing technologies, including ZigBee, EVDO, WiMax, and Wi-Fi, some of which are still in stages of early adoption. ZigBee, utilized in embedded, low-power applications, is designed to act like a mesh enabling connectivity among devices even without base stations. EVDO, meanwhile, runs on regular cellular networks. WiMax and WiFi are implementations of the 802.11 wireless local area networking specification.

Source: WiFi Network News