MuniWirelessVAR

You’ve read the reports: municipal wireless is dead. But how can a dead market be growing 35 percent annually? And why are hundreds of people at the Santa Clara Marriott discussing successful municipal broadband deployments? Check out the Top 50 Trends in Municipal Wireless over on our sister site, MuniWireless.com.

The iPhone isn’t a business device. The iPhone isn’t for business applications. Hogwash. The VAR Guy NEVER believed all of those crazy statements from tech pundits. He has long suspected that Cisco Systems and other companies would find ways to write unified applications for the iPhone. Today, Apple finally bowed to demand and announced a software development kit for the iPhone. The move paves the way for the iPhone to increasingly support business applications.

The next version of WiFi, known as 802.11n, has found a home in the consumer market. But soon, the high-speed WiFi standard will also catch on in the municipal broadband market. A case in point: Tropos Networks and D-Link are partnering to integrate D-Link’s 802.11n technology into Tropos’ WiFi mesh offerings. The Tropos/D-Link relationship comes at a critical time for the municipal broadband industry.

At first glance, Tech Data Corp. is pushing into the municipal wireless market just as everybody else is getting out. But take a closer look, folks, and you’ll discover that Tech Data is actually moving into a growing (though evolving) market — despite some negative press coverage about city WiFi networks. And it’s a market that craves more solutions providers.

The VAR Guy spent September 12 in Dublin, Ireland, locked away with Cisco Systems at the Guinness Brewery. And yes, he actually got some work done. Here are eight key takeaways from the event.

Imagine my surprise: I went to Dublin, Ireland this week to attend a Cisco Systems partner conference. I expected to blog non-stop about channel-related news. And then I ran into an integrator and an application provider that are partnering to build municipal broadband applications in Georgia. It was the perfect story for our sister site, MuniWireless. Here’s the scoop.

If it’s good enough for Cisco Systems, it’s got to be good enough for wireless enterprises. That could be the collective reaction of CIOs who are taking a hard look at the emerging — though incomplete — 802.11n WiFi standard.

The VAR Guy has spent considerable time discussing voice-over-IP this week during conferences in New York and Colorado Springs. Here are five key moves VoIP solution providers need to make, based on separate chats with executives from Avnet, SugarCRM and Sun Microsystems, among other companies.