Some nuggets from San Francisco RFI about city wide wireless/WiFi network…
- Gigabeam is proposing a 1-2.5GBps wireless backbone at 71-76, 81-86Ghz bands.
- JiWire wants to provide VPN services
- EarthLink wants to sell residential broadband (1 Mbps downstream and upstream) for less than $20.00 per month with multiple competing service providers. San Francisco-would not have to spend any dollars on the build-out, which would use equipment from Motorola and Tropos Networks.
- Feeva wants to license their technology, and suggest a multi-business approach to the city’s needs.
- Motorola says it would build a mesh-network that would provide broadband speed to support next generation applications such as video surveillance, transmittal of mug shots and fingerprints, in-car video and personnel geo-location. (Try selling that to privacy activists in the city!) Consumers and government agencies use different parts of the spectrum.
- MetroFi , representing veterans of Covas plans a 1GBps backbone to serve 1 megabit symmetrical connections for $19.95 a month along with free, advertiser-supported connections. MetroFi’s offer looks like a franchise agreement — they’d own the network, the city would deed roof and pole rights, and MetroFi would be the exclusive access provider.
- SFLan, says it costs $7-8 per subscriber in overhead just to processing billing, and instead the city should create a citywide, wholesale internet exchange, paid for by a bond issue. They are against captive portals setups (like Feeva’s at the Main Library), and want open-source, standards-compliant hardware and software running neutral network that The City owns.
- WiLine, a local company, just wants to provide the WiMax backbone technology.
In Cory Doctorow’s book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, they were trying to build a city-wide wifi network as well. I think Cory explored many of the problems and issues of city-wide wifi and it’s a good read.