The future of wireless, we thought, was short-range repeaters on street furniture. Either, the Wi-Fi based model proposed by Westminster Council, or the revolutionary telematics model patented by Last Mile communications.

Here at the WLAN Event in Olympia, Last Mile has officially revealed its plans to install 150,000 wireless circuits, including memory, in 150,000 lampposts in the UK. To do this, it takes advantage of a near-global agreement on roadside telematics - monitoring vehicles - on which in plans to piggy-back commercial services.

The plan has raised eyebrows at Westminster Council, which last year announced a radical scheme to put Wi-Fi on all its lamp-posts, primarily to provide wireless connectivity to Council workers, but with the hope of selling services to the public - hotspots, in fact.

I asked Westminster City chief exec Peter Rogers what he thought of the Last Mile plan. "If that happens, we'll want to have words with the Government," he said darkly.

It turns out that local authorities are, currently prohibited from turning a profit from equipment they put in for their own use, and Rogers believes that new legislation will be needed to permit this.

But Last Mile believes it has authorisation from the Government's Highways Agency to make a profit on the telematics network.

The Last Mile technology uses very much faster data than Wi-Fi can achieve, and enhances this with clever proxy/cache design. Each lamppost contains not only the 63-65 GHz wireless unit, but a large memory store, which will hold around 80 per cent of the data that most people will want to download.

Data which isn't in the post will be sucked from the Internet over a variety of backhaul routes; if necessary, from lamppost to post in a high speed mesh, if no other backbone is handy.

Westminster, however, is committed to Wi-Fi.

It already has four wireless cameras, and Rogers spoke enthusiastically, today, about how they have the potential to revolutionise urban society.

"It's not just about having our workers connected, though we think the productivity benefits of having back-office services available for them will be enormous," he told NewsWireless.Net. "It's also a social thing. With wireless, for example, we can take surveillance cameras and re-site them instantly; as we were recently asked to do by police. As a result, they now have a big drugs bust. And we can tackle urgent social issues like public urination, graffiti, and so on. We even can foresee being able to fit elderly citizens with monitors to make sure they don't collapse and never get discovered."

But, said Rogers, for the City of Westminster to be able to make a commercial service, the Government has to introduce new legislation. "It's not likely that anybody will do anything before the next General Election," he added, pushing the likely deployment of commercial Wi-Fi out by a year or two. "But the Government has now put a substantial amount of funding into the next stage of proving the technology."

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