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The Grill: Muniwireless.com's Esme Vos on the Hot Seat
The founder of MuniWireless.com talks about how things go wrong in muni Wi-Fi, why the EU does it better and who should bear the risk for liberating a city.
October 8, 2007 12:00 PM ETComputerworld -
Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless.com, is a lawyer by training who started blogging about municipal wireless in 2003. The blog became MuniWireless.-com, a worldwide aggregator of information about the industry.
What do you think of recent reports of delays and problems with technology and politics in various municipal wireless projects? Lots of people set up pilot programs with different configurations that dont work, and that becomes news. But you undertake pilots to find the problem areas. Suburbs with a lot of trees act kind of like walls and get in the way of wireless signals, and some set up pilots in the winter without leaves, so its those kinds of errors that account for many of the delays. [Cities should] set up three pilots with different technology, in the hills, in downtown congested areas and near students to see what happens when you upload or download large files.
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But there are some reports of cost overruns. In light of the total growth, how serious are they? Not very serious. Phillys and Portland, Oregons problems are more or less limited to pilot areas. That says something that they have an incentive to fix it first before deploying over a larger area. Youd like to make all the mistakes in a pilot and fix it before rolling out to other areas. There are no fatal flaws for municipal Wi-Fi systems.
What about the San Francisco and Chicago municipal Wi-Fi problems that materialized in August? The two cities had the misfortune of having chosen a partner who was clueless in the business. For a long time, analysts have been wondering why EarthLink persisted with the hopeless Helio [a struggling mobile virtual network operator]. Helio, not muni Wi-Fi, has been EarthLinks downfall. Their muni Wi-Fi plans just got dragged into the mess.
Are the main causes of delays governmental, economic or technical? The technical problems are what we see upfront. Many lamp posts, where Wi-Fi antennas might be attached, are owned by electrical utilities, so we saw a big issue with Southern California Edison and access to poles, but thats now turned around. The economic risk that a private provider faces is immense, perhaps $40 million, so why cant the municipality bear half the cost? Why should an EarthLink bear all the risk, when cities are creating an infrastructure with public benefit? We wouldnt have the private sector build all the roads, and Wi-Fi is similar. Maybe cities should be building their own fiber and wireless networks and selling access to private wholesale operators who then sell access to retail operators. But cities want the easy, cheap way out, so they went the other way, and here we are.
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