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August 19, 2007

Metro Round-Up: St. Petersburg (Flor.) on Hold; Cleveland Wants Free

By Glenn Fleishman

EarthLink tells St. Petersburg to pay, wait: The network provider won the bid for a 60 sq mi network earlier this year by “touting its cash on hand, existing subscriber base and contracts to build networks in larger cities,” reports the St. Petersburg (Flor.) Times. However, the city’s CTO said EarthLink has asked the municipality to wait until fall, when they’ll “have their game plan together.” That game plan includes a commitment to fees from the city, which the CTO said isn’t of interest until the network is running. So that’s pretty much that.

A local firm, Citi Wifi, has been building smaller networks, and lost out in the bidding. The firm would require the city to commit to paying to use the network before building it now, of course, which is only sensible.

Cleveland asked for free municipal service, got five bids, but we’ll see where that goes: The Ohio city, notes MuniWireless.com, bid out for an operator that would give municipal workers no-cost access. Nonetheless, EarthLink, MetroFi, Azulstar, and two other firms responded. We don’t know yet what they said, and EarthLink would likely bow out in any case. MetroFi almost certainly responded that they’d be happy to build a network in which there’s no free service for municipal workers. Esme Vos notes that two firms with intent to bid, ARINC and CONXX, did not. The former (a giant) has done a number of transport-Fi network, and is part of one of the in-flight broadband/voice providers that might launch an offering soon. CONXX runs the network for Allegany County, Maryland, and is the only sizeable installation of Wavion nodes that I’m aware of.

Posted by Glennf at August 19, 2007 4:04 PM

Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal

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