MetroFi wants Portland as an anchor tenant
The city of Portland, Oregon, and its provider, MetroFi, are entering a new phase in the build-out of the city’s ad-supported Wi-Fi network. MetroFi is looking for anchor tenant commitments from the city.The city of Portland, Oregon, and its provider, MetroFi, are entering a new phase in the build-out of the city’s ad-supported Wi-Fi network. MetroFi is looking for anchor tenant commitments from the city.
A recent article in the
However, MetroFi’s Vice President of Marketing Lou Pelosi told me the company had no intention of halting the build out. “We’re going to honor the contract and we have every intention of continuing to deploy the network within the timeframe that the contract allows.”
The contract, which was approved in July, 2006, specifies a three-year build-out. “We have every intention of delivering on that.” Pelosi said. “However, the city’s use of the network and where they will use it will help us determine the speed and locations of the build-out. We’re asking the city of Portland to commit to being an anchor tenant. Really, we’re saying that the realities of growth and where we expand the network is dependent on where the city becomes an anchor tenant.”
Pelosi called Portland “an extremely successful network build-out. Where it hasn’t be as successful is the city of Portland becoming an anchor tenant. The discussion now is really the city of Portland using the network. It’s always been an understanding that the city plays a significant role in making the network financially viable. We’re asking the city to review what their intentions were and review how we’re going to build out the network to make them a user of it. In the interim we will focus on bringing up the access points that have been hung but that have not been brought onto the network.”
MetroFi met with the city’s Bureau of Technical Services on September 26 to review the status of the build-out and discuss its future.
Portland has been one of the success stories of municipal wireless. Despite a few hiccups at the start, the deployment has continued with MetroFi adding access points to improve coverage and usage rising faster than projected. The network has 17,000 unique users who are each averaging 17 hours online per month with each session averaging about an hour.
Pelosi said “we are in agreement with basically the entire industry that, for the industry to be the most viable, we have to require anchor tenancy.”
He said MetroFi has identified 100 remote sites where the city could connect to the network to deliver municipal services. Additionally, it is interested in participating in the city’s plans to replace an aging 800mhz public safety network with a licensed 4.9 mhz overlay to the public 2.4 mhz network it is presently building out for the city.
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My reading of the agreement with the City indicates that project completion is due at 24 months, not three years. Section 6.5 (top of page 24) of the Nonexclusive License Agreement says, in part:
“Licensee shall use reasonable best efforts to complete within twenty-four (24) months from the Effective Date of this Agreement the installation of the System to provide wireless access to all occupied residences, businesses and public parks located within City limits [...]”
http://www.portlandonline.com/index.cfm?a=129511&c=43149
The City’s website indicates the contract was signed “at the end of August 2006″, so the deadline cited above would be August 2008.
I would also note that since (as far as I know) the SkyPilot does not have battery backup, they would become inoperable in the event of a major power disruption as might occur as a consequence of a major subduction-zone earthquake, and might perhaps not be a good way to deploy a public safety network in Portland.
Finally, I wonder about one usage metric that I have not seen released by MetroFi (or perhaps I have missed it), and that is aggregate and average bytes transferred per session.
“However, MetroFi‚Äôs Vice President of Marketing Lou Pelosi told me the company had no intention of halting the build out.”
The road to hell is paved with you know whats. MetroFi may have that intention, but they haven’t contradicted what the Mayor’s Office said: That without further venture funding or anchor tenancy, the network can’t be expanded.
Portland’s point person on Wi-Fi, Luke Kleier, told both me and Mike Rogoway at the Oregonian that the city has no intention of becoming an anchor tenant. (Here’s my report.)
“We’re asking the city of Portland to commit to being an anchor tenant.”: Kleier said it’s not going to happen. The city might purchase additional services, he said, but they are not becoming an anchor tenant.
MetroFi isn’t being disingenuous. I’m sure the talks are ongoing. But Kleier and the Mayor’s Office are being awfully definitive: Kleier said to me, “We’ve been fairly clear from the RFP construction and the contract signature and all the way through today is that our relationship is a no-risk relationship, and does not involve anchor tenancy, and we continue to be clear about that.”
I don’t see any ambiguity in that.
I think Glenn said it well, though I have to disagree on one point. MetroFi is being a bit disingenuous. When Lou Pelosi says, “We‚Äôre going to honor the contract and we have every intention of continuing to deploy the network within the timeframe that the contract allows,” and then adds “Really, we’re saying that the realities of growth and where we expand the network is dependent on where the city becomes an anchor tenant,” he’s not upholding the original contract, which called for 95%, regardless of anchor tenancy commitments from the City.
It may well be impossible for MetroFi to continue their build-out without the City of Portland stepping up and committing to a large service purchase, but that was the deal MetroFi agreed to, and if the current reality has evolved to make that initial agreement financially ruinous they should face that fact and not continue to talk as if the City is readying for a big purchase, when it seems pretty clear that they are planning no such thing (and have in fact stated just the opposite on many occasions).
Given the comment above from Mr. Senior (who failed to disclose his officer-level involvement in Portland’s Personal Telco Project), I share the following clause of the Nonexclusive License Agreement that supports the three-year timeframe:
“Section 8.32 Financial Commitment. Licensee and its Affiliates and Partners shall commit financial resources to complete the development, installation, and initial operation of Services within the three (3)-year initial deployment period.”
MetroFi will make reasonable best efforts within two years, and we have made a financial commitment to complete the development and installation within the three-year initial deployment period.
On another point: Mr. Senior assumes that MetroFi would use SkyPilot equipment for a public safety network in Portland. That is a deployment decision we make with our municipal partners, and Mr. Senior is not currently in a position to accurately communicate our proposal for a licensed, 4.9GHz public safety network in Portland.
Also, we have been completely forthright in our utilization reporting. Has anyone heard from Personal Telco Project about utilization of their 100 nodes?
Regardless, the MetroFi network in Portland (with over 580 active nodes and more to come) has experienced nine straight months of significant utilization growth, and is now one of the most used municipal Wi-Fi networks in the country. We have exceeded the Unwire Portland performance goals and metrics for 2007 (and may meet or exceed 2008 benchmarks by this year’s end), have met the network performance standards in our contract, and remain committed to the ongoing success of this network.
When MetroFi first put for it’s proposal it was pretty clear that anchor tenancy was not needed for it to complete its promised 95% roll out across Portland. The PR spin they spread around touted the Free service as its trump for being a net plus for Portlanders. Much of the city was excited to see this happen.
The proof was in the roll out.
When service was rolled out to the test section of the city and an independent , verifiable, testing[1] was done Metrofi’s reaction was to skewer the messengers and cast them as biased for being part of a group of volunteers that has been setting up wifi hotposts around Portland since the early part of the this decade. It was if being a apart of the non profit all volunteer effort known as the Personal Telco Project(PTP) was akin to being a malicious competitor of Metrofi.
This point needs a closer look as it always struck me as odd. MetroFi is a for profit muni wireless company with investors, revenue streams and a large staff of paid workers while the PTP is a band of Portland volunteers who on occasion have enough cash on hand to buy some off the shelf access points to set up more hotpots in community parks, on neighborhood roof tops or in local coffee shops.
Where is the competition? Where was MetroFi’s motive for skewering the independent report done by two local Portland networking people who also are part of the PTP?
Or was this misplaced aggression on MetroFis PR flaks simply due to the fact that the report hit a little too close to the mark on how the roll out was really going? Was it maybe the case that the “Official” testing was done with MetroFi’s own set of “metrics” rather than the real world ones used in the independent test?
When the roll out reports hit the streets there was little surprise to the people actually using MetroFi’s Free service, the one they had pushed to the fore to win the city bid. When the press picked up on this we began to hear the PR spin whir up a notched. Willy Week[2], The Oregonian[3], The Tribune [4], Daily Wireless [5] (who went so far as to say “But MetroFi‚Äôs service generally sucks.”), local bloger BoJack[6], and scores more… they all made mention to greater or lesser degree on the problems using the services set up by MetroFi much as the independent report had detailed.
So what the heck are we seeing play out here? Is this somehow tied to the woes many other “offical” MuniWifi contracts are having? Is this simply a case where the promise outstripped the technical and financial realities?
I hope that we see more open and public discussion of this.
To make things clear I am a member of the PTP. If you do not know us yet we are a group who help local people and businesses share their internet connections, to build their own interconnected networks and to use networks (PTP or otherwise) to better both each other and our communities. We do this by education and outreach. We have been doing this for the better part of the decade. If you would like to help you can get more information at http://www.personaltelco.net
-tomhiggins
[1] http://www.unwirepdx-watch.org/
[2] http://www.wweek.com/wwire/?p=7518
[3] http://www.oregonlive.com/oregonian/stories/index.ssf?/base/business/1188626107182130.xml&coll=7
[4] http://www.portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=116915490259067400
[5]http://www.dailywireless.org/2007/07/12/metrofi-negative-coverage/
[6] http://bojack.org/2007/07/how_does_portlands_free_wifi_s.html
Ms. Graab,
You asked about PTP node usage, perhaps hinting that we’re dishonest or that no one uses our nodes. Let me clear things up for you, since this seems to be a concern. Personal Telco is primarily an educational non-profit. We have contributed to building a network mainly through teaching others how to setup nodes, advocating for free, open wireless access and through experimental deployments to expand our own knowledge. While on the surface, this gives some the impression that we are a service provider, the truth is that Personal Telco, though being instrumental in much of the free wireless that Portland has enjoyed for many years, manages very few of these nodes directly, and owns the hardware for even fewer.
We don’t make a big deal about our node usage, but we do keep track. We used to announce it to great fanfare at each of our meetings and on our mailing list (which is public and archived), but over time we realized that this wasn’t really what our users cared about. They cared about how our nodes worked for them, so that’s what we focus on.
Now, onto the stats:
We only keep track of a small percentage of our nodes. Since we don’t have ads to sell, it’s not really a big deal. Also, many of our nodes are contributions from individuals with no direct control from the PTP organization. Our node standards don’t require usage tracking and interested individuals may maintain their nodes as they please, so long as access is publicly available to anyone.
Based on the stats we do track, which are publicly available here, we have between 5 and 80 users at a time, with average daily user peaks of approximately 60 users at a time, on the 32 nodes we track.
Now, a word about how we do our tracking:
For most locations (that we track), we use captive portal software (either NoCat or WifiDog) which creates an anonymous log of MAC addresses for users who connect to use the nodes. These stats can be viewed live by anyone by connecting to the captive portal machine for the node at http://.personaltelco.net:5280/status, as in this example: http://loki.personaltelco.net:5280/status
Hostnames can be found on the individual node pages on our website.
We also monitor usage via Cacti, a program that graphs SNMP results (the graphs I linked to above). Cacti indicates the bandwidth used and various other details of network performance, and in some cases displays information for devices that don’t run a captive portal.
That’s how we do it. It’s by no means the most complete way, but it is transparent, and as I said above, it’s not really something that we place a heavy focus on, since we aren’t trying to sell ads or otherwise monetize the usage of our nodes. Mostly it’s information we use to improve what we do, and we share it publicly as an FYI.
Now that I’ve shared all this, would you (or an engineer with more experience) mind detailing the system that MetroFi uses to produce the numbers you release each month and share that data publicly? It’s something that many industry bloggers and journalists have expressed an interest in, and, please correct me if I’m wrong, something MetroFi has declined to share despite repeated requests.
I hope that clears up any lingering doubts about our forthrightness,
Michael
I want to thank Ms Graab for directing my attention to the clause in Section 8.32. I had not noticed that before. When I searched the document for other instances of the word “three”, I also found Section 4.4.2, which has the effect of waiving license fees to the city for mounting gear during the first 3-year period. However, it indicates the fees are only waived “provided that the Licensee continues to make acceptable progress in the completion of the network, in the City‚Äôs sole discretion”.
Ms Graab accurately points out that I am an officer in the Personal Telco Project, however I didn’t *fail* to disclose it, per se. I saw it as having no relevance, so its disclosure was not warranted. I can state unequivocally that I have no financial interest in the failure or success of MetroFi. I am puzzled by what bias Ms Graab might intend to suggest.
Responding to the next paragraph, I did not assume the SkyPilot device would be proposed for a public safety network, only indicated that they might be inappropriate and why I thought so.
As for usage statistics on Personal Telco’s network, we do not currently have any active system-wide mechanism to collect such statistics. That’s partly because we don’t have any need to count them. We don’t sell eyeballs to advertisers. Furthermore, only about 40 of our nodes are at all centrally managed so as to provide the opportunity to collect such data, the rest are maintained independently by volunteers.
However, I can share this: A subset of 11 of of our nodes (some of which are lightly used) do have reasonably good statistics, and I can quote those numbers for some flavor. In the month of September, those 11 nodes saw 406 unique BSSID’s. The top 10 users alone transferred 140 gigabytes of data, so even ignoring the usage of the other 396 users, that’s an average of 345 megabytes of data each.
I remain skeptical of the usage numbers MetroFi reports, not because I know they are wrong, but because I have so little information about how they are compiled that I am not sure what they mean. I would welcome an opportunity to sit down with a MetroFi network engineer and go over the methodology used.
As for meeting the network performance standards, I would also be happy to go with MetroFi to any randomly selected sample of outdoor locations within the 24 square miles of claimed coverage area (as Caleb Phillips and I did in our investigation of outdoor coverage last spring) and put that claim to the test.