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Oklahoma City's Eaton says it's easy for municipalities looking to unwire their cities to try and do too much at once. "You can dream up (an) unbelievable amount of things you can do with these networks," he says. "But you'll never accomplish them unless you take a small subset and make them work."

Eaton recommends cities considering using wireless broadband networks to determine which applications will save time and money. Adding CCTV and other bandwidth-intensive applications from the beginning might not be the best use of resources, he says.

Eaton says his department was flooded with requests from other departments wanting to use the network once the city deployed the WiFi system. First the city had to guarantee that public-safety traffic would take priority, then it tested those applications that it thought would benefit government functions the most. As a result, public-works inspectors quickly were given remote Internet access to make building inspections more efficient. They saved three days' worth of work for each inspection.

Craig Settles, head of Successful.com and municipal consultant, said many times a point person, such as the city CIO, must "slay the interdepartmental rivalry" that often occurs when a number of departments want wireless access.

"Someone has to be the point person and be smart enough to know when to push or let people come aboard," Settles says. "It's not always easy."

Lynnette Luna is a contributing writer to Urgent Communications, a sister publication to Government Product News.

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