Toronto E-City Planners and Hydro don't mesh

Generally I don’t speak out when a company or the city does something really insane. But I just wonder why the Toronto Hydro will be experimenting with new electronic meters that will be connected together using wireless mesh at 900 MHz. I can’t believe it. First the city with it brilliant E-City plan wants to use wireless mesh so the entire city population can go wireless and now the City’s Hydro want to do the same but with meters.

Do you think Toronto Hydro and E-City planner should talk?

Hydro want to use wireless Mesh at 900 MHz while the E-City is planning at 2.4 Ghz. It behooves me why Toronto Hydro and E-City wants to spend our money to build a wireless mesh. Almost every city department want to go wireless in City of Toronto and most of the utilities can benefit from going wireless. But yet they don’t know how to simply communicate together, never mind mesh!

What is actually happening is our E-City planners have failed us once again. They are not with out vision but they sure out without leadership. When I talked to CIO of City of Toronto he told me that when we deploy wireless mesh in the City of Toronto we would use “Best Practices.” Wireless mesh is so new that best practices have yet to be developed never mind adopted.

Wireless mesh will be outstanding for city of Toronto and the Province of Ontario. I just hope that the planner can see beyond there own requirements.