City and municipal governments can also benefit greatly from the development of a Municipal Wi-Fi network in that fire, police, safety and medical equipment can be more effectively optimized in its used across broad geographic areas (Zhang, Schiffman, Gibbs, Kunjithapatham, Jeong, 2009). Using these forms of communication would also allow for greater responsiveness to emergency situations and a more effective series of strategies for managing ongoing communications across all government agencies in a given metro area. As both private industry and government benefit from a metropolitan Wi-Fi, both need to share in its costs as well (Tang, Baker, 2002). A Technology Capable of Shared Ownership Across Government and Private Industry

The underlying technological foundations of WiMax concentrate on a consortium-based approach to defining specific aggregation, transmission, measurement of performance and optimal usage scenarios for metropolitan-wide Wi-Fi networks (Zhang, Schiffman, Gibbs, Kunjithapatham, Jeong, 2009). In short, the technology platform lends itself well to a funding strategy that includes both government and private sector funding. The structure of a typical WiMAX Scenario is shown in Figure 1. He support for a multitude of different clients, base station, transmission, aggregation and multi-service core functionality are all easily segmented by government vs. private sector funding and use.

Figure 1: WiMAX Scenario...

With a strong focus on these two core needs, any Metropolitan Wi-Fi implementation can excel and deliver a strong Return on Investment (ROI) at a high performance level (O'Shea, 2006). By combining funding sources both government and private sector, Metropolitan Wi-Fi implementations can deliver the necessary breadth and depth of service, security and performance levels over the long-term.