Digital cities and open MANs: A new communications paradigm

Digital cities can be defined as a highly interactive digital communication environment built to mimic the behavior of real cities. Open access metropolitan area networks (open MANs) are communication networks built to allow universal access of city's population to a single digital multimedia communication network. The goal of this paper is to discuss the impact in the community when delivering digital cities solutions upon the universal access scenario of the open MANs. We also present results obtained of deployment of such solutions in some Brazilian cities and the perspectives for this project in Brazil in the coming years.