With all the attention being lavished on large municipal wireless networks such as the one being built by the city of Philadelphia, or the one proposed by San Francisco, the fact of the matter is that it is small towns which are (and rightfully so) being more aggressive in embracing MuniFi.
This week alone three tiny towns – Vail in Colorado along with Rockland and Thomaston in Maine – unwired their future. Vail, selected CenturyTel to build its system following a competitive bid process that included proposals from six other companies. The deal is pretty much the same as in other towns that have been unwired.Free Internet access up to 300Kbps (kilobits per second) anywhere in town by the end of 2006. Vail will also offer higher speeds on a daily, weekly and monthly pay cycle.
The situation in Rockland and Thomaston, both communities in Maine the situation was the one faced by many small communities. There was little or no broadband. The two towns teamed up with RedZone Wireless, that built the network, and now sells broadband in the $19.95 to $50.00 per month range. (All three deployments are using Skypilot Networks’ equipment. WiFiNetNews has more details on the Maine deployment. )
“While larger Internet Service Providers have targeted tier 1 markets for their initial municipal mesh roll-outs, RedZone is pursuing the other 25% of the marketplace, which is made up of towns having populations of 5-50,000,” said Jim McKenna, president, RedZone Wireless. “Many of these communities are presently underserved and a community mesh network is the fastest and most cost effective means to extend high speed Internet service to these areas. After only six months of service, our penetration rate rivals that of local DSL and cable providers,” continued McKenna.
I like that the small towns are taking control of their broadband future. I have recently made an acquaintance with someone in a small town in Idaho, and they are still on dial-up. Now that is a tiny town of about 2,500 that is crying out for broadband. It is deplorable that in 2006 we have places in the US where there is no broadband. Shouldn’t FCC be allocating some of the USF dollars into these rural MuniFi networks? For once tax payers’ money would be put to good use.
very Informative Article.
Thanks a lot
I am wondering if anybody knows the cost of wifi enabling these cities ?
In case of Mountain View, Google spent around a million dollars on wirelessly enabling the entire city. I bet for areas of equal size, that would be a good yard stick. It will be less for smaller towns. Of course it depends a lot on the topography and access to the backbone etc.
Thanks Om. Infact it is available on your earlier post http://featured.gigaom.com/2006/08/15/google-launches-wifi-network-in-mountain-view/
Speaking of USF funding. I live in a town way too small for muni Wifi, but we have experience with USF. There are 8 full time residents and 20 more on a good weekend.
We just got phone service a month ago. USF paid for 10 miles of undergrounded cable to serve us. USF will only pay for POTS so we now have dial up. Better than nothing.
In order to get DSL our carrier had to convince the holders of the USF funds they needed a T-1 to monitor the service to their customers. USF approved providing a T-1 for that purpose only.
As you can imagine, there is a lot of excess capacity that will become availabl to us.
It is crazy talk in this day and age for USF to not fund broadband explicitly. We are just grateful our carrier knew how to game the system.
I think $50,000 – $100,000/sqmi (depending on topography and building styles) is still a good capital cost range for mesh WiFi. What it takes to run the network annually is a more interesting question and probably highly dependant on existing IT infrastructure/staff of whoever has that job. I could see it easily being as high as 25% of the cap. cost per year, but it could also be dramatically less if you are offering a free service with very limited user support.
Meanwhile, in terms of cities, I think an interesting question is which tier 2/3 city will get citywide service first. Clearly tier 1 cities like Philly and San Fran will take years do to politics, but a Pittsburgh or Providence could get done pretty fast. Boston could surprise people on the tier 1 front, given that either Harvard or MIT could just say screw it and pay for the whole thing out of a few minutes of interest on their endowments.
Excuse me but just what is so great about the cities of Rockland and Thomaston, Maine gouging residents out of $19.95 to $50.00 a month for hotspot access? Heck, I can get a better deal from Starbucks/T-Mobile. And Starbucks probably won’t send the police after me if they don’t like what I do with it. Maybe instead of seeing wifi as an opportunity for hick officials to pad the muni budget, it should be viewed as a public service that city governments have a unique opportunity and responsibility to provide FOR FREE. After all, my local coffee shop (and ice cream stand, and supermarket, &c.) don’t seem to have a problem giving it away. In fact they do rather well because they do.