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March 29, 2008

Minneapolis Gets a Workout

By Glenn Fleishman

My pal Julio Ojeda-Zapata walks around Minneapolis, and is relatively pleased with its network: Julio writes for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the twin city to Minneapolis, and one that hasn’t yet engaged in what was an explosion of requests for Wi-Fi networks by cities. He had a rocky start, unable to even get a splash screen, but ultimately was able to pay for a 24-hour pass ($10), and had consistent service on a laptop, albeit at half the 1 Mbps rate he was paying for. He couldn’t get an iPod touch (Apple’s iPhone without the phone Wi-Fi iPod) to work well on the network indoors, but had better luck outside.

The same day Julio’s article appeared, his colleague Leslie Brooks Suzukamo filed an article about the challenges of leaves, something that’s a big issue in Minneapolis, covered with the leafy menaces: 200,000 of the suckers that Gipper said caused pollution (as an allergy sufferer, I agree with him). Trees leaf out and reduce signal propagation, and that’s something that US Internet Wireless has had to deal with. They upped their density of nodes from 26 to 42, which appears to be about the norm for both starting and ending points in muni netwrk planning.

This article goes into a little more depth about the problems with dead areas due to absent or problematic utility poles (it’s always about the poles). USIW plans to install some of its own poles to fill in those areas.

Nearby, Steve Alexander notes a pioneering wireless network at the University of Minnesota has become obsolete. The U of M is replacing its 7-year-old 802.11b network with an 802.11n system. As is true in most older networks, they’ve got a melange of gear that’s a headache to keep running and in sync. They’ll spend $3.5m to cover about 40 percent of the campus with N, replacing a current similar coverage area. They may expand the network and add VoIP in the future.

The university and USIW are discussing interconnecting their networks for roaming.

Posted by Glennf at March 29, 2008 5:19 PM

Categories: Municipal

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