operates wi-fi zones across Europe.

The City of London, is a geographically-small city within Greater London, England. The City of London is a major business and commercial centre. It is often referred to as just the City or as the Square Mile, as it is approximately one square mile (2.6 km²) in area.

The City of London’s network will provide a major test of whether the public really wants to surf on the move - and whether there is any money to be made from it, says the BBC.

In related news, tomorrow, BelAir Networks will announce a broadband public safety network blanketing the entire city of Beaverton, Oregon, located seven miles west of Portland and encompassing over 18 square miles with more than 83,000 residents. Invictus Networks worked closely with the city to install and operate the network using BelAir Networks? wireless mesh infrastructure.

Over the network, officers can access their desktop in their patrol cars and will be able to wirelessly review mug shots and digitalized fingerprints, as well as issue electronic traffic citations on PDAs from the field.

High-performance BelAir200 and Belair100 wireless multi-service nodes were installed throughout Beaverton to provide wireless coverage to city hall and commercial districts.

Also known as the ?Silicon Forest?, Beaverton is home to technology companies such as Intel and IBM. The City of Beaverton, in Washington County, had their Information Systems Department install and deploy the wireless mesh network in police cars. Under the leadership of Lieutenant Andrea Moore, the city fitted its fleet of forty police cars with wireless-enabled computers enabling real-time access to critical information. Washington County is one of three Oregon counties making up the Greater Portland Metropolitan area.

Wireless Newsfactor describes the different architectures of BelAir Networks, Cisco Systems, Firetide, MeshDynamics, Motorola, Nortel Networks, PacketHop, Rajant, RoamAD, SkyPilot and Strix Systems:

• Tropos’ MetroMesh OS with PWRP can scale to thousands of routers in a mesh network without exceeding 5 percent of available bandwidth. It achieves this by measuring throughput 5 times a second on all available paths back to the wired network. Then, each router selects the path with the highest throughput.
• Firetide’s EtherDirect enables the mesh to operate as several small local clusters of nodes. Each cluster can support about 30 nodes and connects to other clusters.
• MeshDynamics’ intelligent Structured Mesh nodes are configured with one 802.11b/g radio for client access and two 802.11a radios for backhaul.
• The BelAir 200 features a plethora of backbone radio options, providing antenna selection, to switch the signal path in the appropriate direction to eliminate the need for the installer to manually point the antennas.
• Strix configures its network with up to six radios per node.
• SkyPilot has a high-gain, 8-antenna array and offers 4.9 GHz public safety option.
• Cisco has a dual radio system coupled with their popular controllers and promotes mesh standards using the Lightweight Access Point Protocol.

Ratification of IEEE 802.11s, a mesh networking standard, is expected in 2008, but pre-802.11s gear may begin to show up in the next few months. A draft standard was submitted for a Letter Ballot in November 2006, but failed to reach the necessary 75% approval. The current draft (as of April 2007) is D1.02.

The 802.11s mesh standard should enable interoperability among Wi-Fi mesh vendors, enhancing competition and lowering costs.

The 802.11r standard, for fast WiFi roaming, is likely to make its way to market by late 2007 or early 2008, says Dark Reading. It effectively “mobilizes” 802.11i’s security services and 802.11e’s QoS functions.

Related DailyWireless articles include; Toronto?s BelAir Cloud Tops Test, Dolphin Stadium Unwired, County Public Safety Nets, Belair: Firefighter, Testing Municipal Networks, Belair For Minneapolis, Public Safety Mesh, Belair + Fujitsu + Cable, Motorola?s WiFi Mesh, UK Unwires 12 Cities and Belair Expands London Cloud.

Read more at: http://www.dailywireless.org/2007/04/23/belair-live-in-london/.