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A survey of more than 200 North American municipalities finds them flocking to wireless technologies for an array of applications.

Driving all other concerns is public safety. Two-thirds of survey respondents say that is the main reason for spending tax dollars on wireless broadband networks and various types of wireless sensor networks, according to the report from ON World, a San Diego business research firm that focuses on emerging wireless markets.

The report says that personnel safety and being able to locate personnel are the main interests for public safety applications.

Just over one-third of the sample say they are "highly interested" in wireless traffic management systems, and 41 percent have the same level of interest in wireless parking management. The larger the city, the greater the interest: in cities with 500,000 or more residents, two-thirds are highly interested in wireless parking management.

Almost half of the sample say they are planning to deploy newfangled automated electrical meter reading systems within the next 18 months. Of this group, 35 percent are doing so in conjunction with a wireless sensor network that will deliver new services such as electricity load management and outage management for the first time.

As an example of these trends, the report cited a mobile sensor network deployment being tested at the Chicago Fire Department. The department is partnering on the project with a vendor of miniature wireless sensors, Moteiv, and with UC Berkeley, Harvard University and others. Data collected by the sensors is uplinked wirelessly to the commander on-site, and the aggregated data is sent back to head-mounted displays built into the firefighter's mask.

The report also noted that Korea plans to spend US$25 billion over the next seven years to create a large-scale test bed, dubbed "ubiquity city" or u-City, that shows the benefits of multiple pervasive wireless nets such as RFID and wireless sensors.