Wi-Fi has become the preferred means for connecting to the internet at home, in the office, in hotels and at airports. Increasingly, Wi-Fi also provides internet access for remote communities where it is deployed by volunteers in community-based networks, by operators in hotspots' and by municipalities in hotzones'. This book traces the global success of Wi-Fi to the landmark change in radio spectrum policy by the US FCC in 1985, the initiative by NCR Corporation to start development of Wireless-LANs and the drive for an open standard IEEE 802.11, released in 1997. It also singles out and...

The European Commission's Digital Agenda for Europe sets the targets for broadband development by 2020, yet current broadband market outcomes vary widely amongst the EU Member States and the objectives seem challenging for many. In this book, a group of in-country experts follows a framework of qualitative and quantitative analysis to capture patterns, commonalities and differences between twelve different European countries, in terms of infrastructure endowments, institutional arrangements, time of joining the EU, behavior of market actors, personal interventions of regulators, the role of...