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April 12, 2008

Metro Round-Up: St. Louis, Minneapolis, Tempe

By Glenn Fleishman

St. Louis’s downtown Wi-Fi network goes live: AT&T overcame the problem that led them to cancel a city-wide Wi-Fi network—a lack of 24-hour-a-day power on utility poles—by building just a square mile out with nodes placd on traffic lights. The lack of power is rather difficult to overcome, and traffic lights are spaced too sparsely to replicate this deployment city-wide. AT&T is offering free, ad-supported 512 Kbps service and paid 1 Mbps. This seems rather paltry given the 72 access points that the reporter told me were being placed across that square mile. (That number is what led to my estimate of at least $500,000 in cost in the first year.)

BelAir’s radios praised in Minneapolis deployment: Okay, they’re praised mostly by BelAir and its customer USI Wireless. That’s buttressed by details from a Novarum survey of the city that was done before the network was complete over a limited area.

Tempe moves to cancel Gobility’s contract: The city could choose to take ownership of the network, but has opted for canceling the service, which would lead to other steps. This article notes that Gobility isn’t communicating with city officials, but then a city official states late in the article that Gobility is still looking for a buyer for its assets.

Posted by Glennf at April 12, 2008 9:15 PM

Categories: Municipal

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