Ninety businesses attended a prospective vendor meeting for building Minneapolis's fiber/Wi-Fi municipal network in early June: Vendors like the vagueness of the plan, which sketches out needs without rigidly defining them. That worries me a bit because it means that the vendor has to write an RFP about the RFP, but it also means the city will get a lot of range of options to choose from. Qwest and Time-Warner are interested in submitting a plan, as are much smaller firms.
The plan is still described as "retail"--the infrastructure builder will resell directly to the city, consumers, and businesses. This seems like a mistake. No one provider can receive the maximum return on a closed network. The network should be wholesale allowing the operator to load it fully and allowing ISPs and other firms to resell and bear the cost of customer support at the application layer.