By Gene J. Koprowski
UPI Science News

Published 11/26/2004 7:07 AM
CHICAGO, Nov. 26 (UPI) -- A light goes out on a desolate street corner in Los Angeles -- one of 240,000 streetlights in that city. For decades, the only way city bureaucrats learned the bulbs were burned out was when they received a call -- some 500 a week on average -- from panicked consumers telling them there was an outage. No longer. A new wireless mesh network, linking the lights to computer servers, notifies managers at the city's bureau of street lights that a lamp went out on North Broadway or North San Fernando. "An employee at his or her desktop can monitor and control the system," said Dave Schuellerman, a spokesman for General Electric's consumer and industrial products division."It helps to make the maintenance and repair operations more efficient and it improves a city's ability to keep more lights on more of the time -- a factor that can make people and businesses feel more secure," he told UPI's Wireless World.Technology companies from GE to Motorola are making mobile communications seamless across cities. -- Wireless World is a weekly series by UPI examining the social, political and economic ramifications of wireless technologies. E-mail sciencemail-AT-upi.com.