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Self-driving cars in Salt Lake City? Downtown chosen to be lab for ‘smart city’ wireless technology

The next generation of wireless technology is coming — promising everything from faster data to self-driving cars — and Salt Lake City is one of the first stops.

A section of downtown Salt Lake City is one of two sites nationwide chosen to host a city-scale advanced wireless testbed, in a program devised by the National Science Foundation and a consortium of 28 networking companies and associations. The choice was announced Monday morning.

“We want to make sure researchers here in the U.S. have an opportunity to test outdoors, at scale in a real urban environment, some of the innovations that we know will be part of the wireless networks of the future,” said Joe Kochan, program director for the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research (PAWR) program.