Many comapnies offering Wifi services are approaching Cities for right-of-way occupancy licenses. In other words, they wish to offer a privately owned commercial service, and wish to mount radios on land owned and purchased by municipalities. This is essentially the same sort of arrangement that landline telephone companies, cable companies, and electric companies pursue. In this arrangement, the City is merely a landlord, and has no ownership interest, and is not purchasing services.

This is as opposed to the RFP process, where a City contracts with a provider to install a specific wifi service, usually in order to gain availability where none has been installed privately. In this scenario, the Cities become a customer of the RFP respondant, or an owner of a system constructed to their specs.

In the future, I expect the occurence of new municipal RFPs to disappear entirely, as companies discover and construct successful private networks and offer them as commercial services by licensing the right to occupy the ROWs in the same way utilities have been doing for a hundred years in the form of utility franchises.

A City that “profers” an RFP, is going to have to front a lot of taxpayer money to complete the contract, and in the end, will receive nothing different than a City which licensed its ROWs and spent no money up front.

There are many Cities that have done these RFP deals in one form or another, yet very few have a fully functional network to show for it. There is even less evidence of Cities building networks which are financially self-sustaining.

On the other hand, a City doing a traditional ROW license assumes no risk, spends no public money, and receives all the various benefits that can be made available to its citizens, and for its own operations. All these companies are anxious to have the City as a customer, and offer attractive terms for service.

I predict the days of these RFP profers are over.

From the city side, the RFP is the tradtional way of managing their procurement risk, but it is imperfect. Because of the preference for bidding (sometimes required, often only preferred), I predict that we will continue to see RFPs, but also more marginal RFPs. Cities like to do things the safe way, so they let a bid when in doubt. But there are hidden risks in an RFP; one risk is the political momentum that develops in an RFP and the pressure it creates to make an award – there’s an expectation of an award on the back end. Cities often deal with an assumption that they must choose from among the responding pool of vendors, even if responses are inadequate.

Those cities with more flexibility to pursue alternative means of uniting with a private sector partner will enjoy greater options and will be able to land the most suitable private sector partner in shorter timeframes. The city that understands what it has to offer a partner, that has spent time surveying the market of options, and that works with a consultant to find the best match, arguably has as good or better a chance of finding a good match and negotiating a good deal in the municipal wireless space, given current market dynamics.

I can roam on WiFi with a VoIP handset or compliant device, and avoid costs all day (& nite)! sure beats going into a costly brick&mortar to “do business”; it is not your grandfather’s model anymore.