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October 26, 2007

St. Louis Network Won't Be Built

By Glenn Fleishman

AT&T backs off from St. Louis, Mo., Wi-Fi network, but let’s not be too hard on them: The network hit a snag that cropped up after an 18-month negotiation between the city and the company: the 51,000 street lights that were the first candidates for mounting Wi-Fi receivers receive no power during the day, and are bank-switched, meaning that power is centrally switch on and off for large numbers of poles at once. Utility poles were looked at, but in St. Louis, these are located primarily in the wrong places, such as alleys. Other locations proved to be equally problematic, as well as using batteries. Street lamps could be rewired, but it would cost an estimated $28m.

I’m a bit surprised that there wasn’t a survey of poles and lights as part of the process before AT&T bid, but the bidding process has varied city by city. In some cases, exhaustive inventories of city and utility facilities were assembled and enumerated; in others, that was all secondary to securing a basic deal.

AT&T will build out a square mile of service downtown for now.

Posted by Glennf at October 26, 2007 4:43 PM

Categories: Metro-Scale Networks, Municipal

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