E.

As a director and industry consultant that has independently studied not only technology applications but also business models in municipal wireless networks, I’ll say what I have been saying for years. Municipal wireless networks are public/private networks. In fact my organization’s business and technology cluster (ProjectSafety) years ago not only identified the importance of wireless mobile mesh technologies and applications but offered a business model called Community Network Integration (CNI) that required both public and private participation for it to work.

The CNI model makes it clear that all the local stake holders need to have skin in the municipal wireless network from the start. This includes every local government agency, business and citizen. By sharing network assets, costs and revenues; every individual organization can then target and deploy their specific application on a single shared network. What we have today in local wireless access to networks is a separation of available communication assets and spectrum, many times requiring specialized end devises to even connect to the network. The new municipal wireless networks designs are the local wireless Internet following national and international shared standards. The very design of these muniwireless networks support a one size fits all infrastructure. Local government agencies, businesses and citizens will soon realize that sharing municipal wireless network costs, just like we did with the Internet, is the proven answer to high quality survivable and efficient municipal wireless networks.

Let me quickly end this with a disturbing reality. The big application enchiladas in municipal wireless networks are in transportation applications. If we don’t get the core municipal mesh to mobile mesh infrastructure in place, and begin to share existing applications in the network, we may have to wait for a whole new transportation network to be built. The sociological implications of delaying these new wireless technologies as stated years ago by Intelligent Transportation Society of America are staggering:

Annual Safety Impacts
42,000 lives lost
3,000,000 Injuries
$230 billion in medical costs

Traffic
$ 6 billion in personal hours lost per year
$ 80 billion in lost wages and wasted fuel
20-30% more roads built ($280 billion ITS America)

Homeland Security
Goods monitoring
Oil dependency

Environment
Quality of living

Enough is enough. No more local government RFP’s asking for the world from private companies and giving nothing in return. This is not about some popular flash in the pan political hype about your city being cool and having municipal wireless. This is about the core safety, security, economic and quality of life responsibilities that are priorities of all local governments. Municipal wireless networks are just ways of using technology to rapidly and economically addressing these basic responsibilities. There are virtually hundreds of grants and billion of dollars available to support these types of local services. Then there is still a place for the private sector and the citizen to even further subsidize these core services that could eventually eliminate municipal recurring costs. It’s all about public/private and the workable business model is called Community Network Integration. So who wants to be first to do it right?

Maybe this is why our private partner was not really responsive to keeping this network up and running. It was not a positive cash flow for them thus smart business decision to let it go. Has Earthlink come to this realization.

Is subscription sales the only way our municipality is going to see a return on our $500,000. Not really. We see other benefits. Police on the street longer because they can do their reports from the cars rather than the squad room. More information to our firefighters before they make scene on a possible structure fire. AMR project. Tourist access to city wide internet. These are all hard dollar and soft dollar returns that are real.

When I look at our customer reports and see daily users each weekend that are not from Texas, heck, not from the US, and think what is that worth to our tourist industry. That someone from another state or country has come to our little rural community and found ubiquitous internet connectivity. How does the commercial go, “Priceless”.

We took ownership 4 months ago and have been signing up new customers everyday. We receive at least 3 calls a week from folks that are in the process of moving to Granbury and have heard of our network and want to make sure that the home that they are moving into has access to our network. We are selling CPE devices to customers to enhance the signal inside to address the issue of poor indoor reception. We are continuing to evaluate our deployment based on usage and adjusting units based on usage trends.

Our current project is to deploy our vendors indoor routers into the businesses in town (Hotels, Resturants, Retail Shops) and expand the mesh indoors. The problem is we have more businesses wanting it than resources to deploy. I really think this is going to add a whole new dimension to the network.

I read a book quite a few years ago about the JPL Mars Rover project called Faster, Better, Cheaper. Maybe the Earthlinks of the world need to read it. We run the entire City, not just the wireless mesh network, all of our servers, users, 100+ desktops, websites, mail, you name it, with a staff of 3. I always tell my staff “Don’t tell what we can’t do, Tell me what we can do.” Until municipalities engage integraters that take this type of approach, and find that Faster, Better, Cheaper route, you will continue to see the Earthlinks of the world re-evaluating their involvement and bailing.

The real mindset that needs to take place in government is this, name one capital improvement project that municipalities, states, or even a nation can take on that has an impact on all tax paying citizens. I argued, yes purchasing this network back was expensive, $325,000. But show me another capital project for that cost that every citizen could use, or be impacted by.

Of course that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong……

Hello!

PS: Joe Panettieri, I like your perspective here. Great work. This is the kind of article angle we little guys want to see.

Collectively, those of us who sought to shift the conversation to other models, to multi-purpose networks, to models where cities paid, etc. could not get much attention, when all the buzz was about “free” Wi Fi and ever larger big city networks in SF, Houston, Chicago, etc.

While I feel for EarthLink and all their problems, I’m breathing a sigh of relief, because like a strong wind that blows away the sand to reveal what lies underneath, we can now hope to get some attention for more sound business models and other applications that were relatively ignored before.

Let’s hope so, because underlying technological drivers have not changed. We still need more broadband, cheaper broadband, mobile broadband, disaster broadband, and rural broadband; incumbents will still be slow to provide it, and Wi Fi Mesh and WiMAX still have a role to play.

We need to move away from thinking only of citywide networks to think of Hot Zones, away from single purpose networks to think of multiple niche applications sharing a network, away from residential access revenues to think of industrial access revenues from AMR and other distributed infrastructure monitoring, sensor devices, and video surveillance support, to name just a few.

We need more creativity and imagination, and finally, a lot more patience. Our thinking to date has been too one dimensional.

Subscriptions: Without ubiquitous and reliable coverage INDOORS, WHERE PEOPLE USE THE INTERNET, Joe and Jane Websurfer WILL NOT pay $20 a month for muni WiFi.

Advertising: Without indoor coverage, again, the Websurfer family’s ad-consuming eyeballs will remain glued to their DSL or cable-fed computers.

Anchor Tenancy: There are not nearly enough WiFi-hungry cop cars, fire trucks or union job-displacing AMRs in a city of any size to pay for these networks.

Earthlink saw the writing on the wall. AT&T, IBM and other potential network operators see it also. Unfortunately, they are the ones that count, not the Richard Bulls of the world.