From Techdirt
http://news.techdirt.com/news/wireless/article/6717
Putting A Little Lipstick On Muni WiFi
Back in May, 2004, Municipal Wireless was still just on the drawing
board, but a few towns and cities were about to lead the charge into
using WiFi to meet their admirable goal of providing low-cost
connectivity. At the time, I wrote about Chaska, Minnesota, a suburb of
Minneapolis that was launching their citywide network. I argued in
Techdirt and in USA Today that WiFi would be the wrong choice for Muni
Wireless because of range (it's a LAN technology) and interference
issues, among others. My opinion was contrasted by Bradley Mayer, the
city IT Manager responsible for spearheading Chaska.net, who was very
optimistic about the planned network. By October, we were both again
quoted in a CNN.com article in which I say: "I haven't seen a lot of
what I would consider real successes yet [with municipal wireless]. More
and more cities are announcing they're going to do [Muni WiFi], and I
get concerned because I'm hearing more and more rhetoric that isn't
consistent with the underlying technology." Mr. Mayer, in contrast,
said, "So far, customers are happy with the city's Wi-Fi start".
Accepting what Mayer said as truth, myself and others had to concede
that smaller towns may prove us wrong on Muni WiFi. I actually spoke
with Mayer in late 2004 as part of some private research I was
conducting for a telco client, and he again portrayed the Chaska WiFi
network as a glowing example of how Muni WiFi works well.
Flash forward to the present, and imagine how frustrating it is, then,
to see Mr. Mayer admit, ex post facto, that Chaska's network was
actually quite a mess. Of course, the Tribune article claims that that
is all in the past, and now the network is great. Well, I'm sorry, but
there is a credibility gap to address now. We were told it was "great"
18 months ago, but later we're told by the same person "It took about a
year and a half before we felt we really had a good handle on the
network." And according to Mayer's' boss, "The speed wasn't good, or
they [subscribers] couldn't get on [the network]. Sometimes customer
service was a problem. It was hard for us to staff up to meet peak
times." There was an early 50% cost over-run to deploy more APs, and
there has been a subsequent full upgrade to the next generation of
Tropos gear. The city, not able to handle the maintenance of the
network, contracted Siemens to do the task, and also has outsourced
support. However good they claim things are now, it certainly looks like
it was a disaster until just recently. And those are the real results
from Chaska, a city that had all the advantages of manageable size,
pre-existing links to the Internet backbone, ownership of the local
power utility, low building height, and full utility pole access. But
now, we're to believe the current network is great because they say
so...again.
Mr. Mayer, who parlayed his Muni WiFi deployment experience in Chaska
into a better job as the WiFi deployment expert at Earthlink, is quoted
in the Trib as saying "there was a lot of pre-conceived notions that you
could just blast [Wi-Fi signals] through walls and trees and
everything." It might save a lot of money if Muni Broadband enthusiasts
take a good hard look at WiFi vs. other options before deployment,
instead of forging ahead on wishful thinking and pre-conceived notions.
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