Improve Economic Growth

MWNs appear to resolve digital divides in Internet access. The term digital divides is the gulf between people with broadband accessibility and people who can’t access broadband connectivity due to income differentials. MWN projects include education and workforce training programs (Fesenmaier, Jain, Mandiwalla, Meyers, Smith, Weinberg, 2008). This allows for people to gain basic technological skills that will assist them in attaining better employment.

Setting up MWNs will generate more jobs. Since people are generally interested in what’s going on in their local area, projects can be developed that will allow communities to share their knowledge and personal experience. Urban Tapestries is a research project that does just that. This concept is beneficial because if implemented along with a MWN, these individuals will be able to inform everyone within the communities of local events taking place. This draws in financial opportunities for local software writers as well as technical hardware specialists. It brings on a self-generating economic model by allowing innovative thinkers to create software that is user-friendly so that people in these communities can find it easy to post their own threads (Lane, 2003).


References:

Barrett, Craig. (2008, February 20). Digital Evolution. Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Video Lecture. Retrieved May 10th 2008 from
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/552

Fesenmaier, Julie., Jain, Abhijit., Mandiwalla, Munir., Meyers, Gregory S., Smith, Jeffrey W., Weinberg, Paul. (2008, February). Municipal Broadband Wireless Networks. Communications of the ACM, Vol 51(2):72-80. Pace University Henry Birnbaum Library. Retrieved April 15th 2008 from ACM Digital Library.

Grebb, Michael (2005, October). Cities Unleash Free Wi-Fi. Wired. Retrieved on April 25th 2008 from http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/news/2005/10/68999?currentPage=all

Lane, Giles. (2003, July). Urban Tapestries: Wireless Networking, public authoring and social knowledge. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol 7 (3-4):169-175. Pace University Henry Birnbaum Library. Retrieved April 18th 2008 from ACM Digital Library.