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March 29, 2007

Metro Round-Up: Moorhead (Minn.), Tri-Cities (Ill.), San Marcos (Tex.)

By Glenn Fleishman

Trouble in the tiny town with a capital W: Moorhead owns its own Wi-Fi network, and they’ve had problems getting it to work for residents. With 32,000 residents (in 2000), the city estimates they need more than 10 percent to sign up for service to break even; they’re at about 6 or 7 percent now, and the churn rate isn’t mentioned . This Minnesota Public Radio story looks at a few residents and their experiences. The moral is that the city relied on recommendations rather than running gear through exhaustive tests themselves, and had to revise their original plans. I’d also say that it sounds like based on performance, node density or line of sight to nodes is a problem, too. Adding more nodes doesn’t fix all metro Wi-Fi ills, but we’re going to continue to hear a lot about how “we put in too few nodes per square mile for the service we intended to offer.”

San Marcos signs contract for network: MetroNetIQ of Austin will work the city to find an infrastructure builder and manage the Wi-Fi rollout. The network will be used for public access and municipal purposes, such as the oft-cited remote meter reading. The city has about 50,000 residents, and 25,000 college students attending Texas State University. The city network will co-exist with a 2 sq mi university Wi-Fi network. Cost is estimated from $2.5m to $5m, and the network will span 25 sq mi. MetroNetIQ has a long blog post about the city and how the network will be developed.

Posted by Glennf at March 29, 2007 9:31 AM

Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal

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