The city of St. Louis Park, Minn., finds itself with a network that's incomplete and doesn't meet basic contract requirements, the Star Tribune reports: The for-fee network, being built by ARINC but owned by the city, hasn't fulfilled even the first level of service quality required before additional testing is performed in any of the four quadrants of the network, according to St. Louis Park. The network was supposed to be in full operation by summer, and now after lengthy delays, there's no longer any expected completion date. The firm was the low bidder in part because of its unique reliance on solar power to drive the nodes; that's apparently not the root of the problems.
The 45,000 person city has 20,000 households, and has 4,000 people reregistered for service, which likely means about one person per household. This is an incredibly high potential penetration rate, although the city's numbers at the time of the bid award were that they were looking for about 6,100 households (32 percent) to sign up within 12 months.
The city claims $300,000 in revenue loss so far due to the delays. Early in the year, residents balked at the first design for the 16-foot poles that would be mounted in hundreds of places around the city, and that led to a two-month hiatus while the infrastructure was redesigned.