Wi-Fi is beginning to seem less like a coffee-shop frill and more like a civic right, with cities from Philadelphia to New Orleans and San Francisco planning wireless networks that cover the entire city. The problem has been the cost of deploying enough routers to provide adequate coverage, especially in busy areas with lots of potential Wi-Fi users.

Tropos Networks, a maker of wireless routers, thinks it's solved that problem with its new line of routers, News.com reports. The new routers have two radios instead of just one -- one for providing Wi-Fi service, and the other for transmitting the resulting traffic up to the Internet. That means Tropos can provide 50 percent more coverage for an area with the same number of routers, explains Wi-Fi Networking News. As a result, overall network costs could drop about 30 percent -- and that's good news for any city trying to come up with a budget for a wireless network.

That's a nice change of pace. After all, how often do municipal infrastructure costs drop instead of spiraling out of control?