MuniWireless

Portland isn’t having a lot of luck with its service provider, MetroFi. The municipal wireless broadband network is supposed to be finished by summer this year, but some sources report that there’s only 15 to 20 percent coverage, mostly in the downtown area. MetroFi has told the city that it will not continue with the project unless the city makes a financial contribution in the form of an anchor tenancy. The city says that MetroFi should live up to its agreement to build a network without municipal funding. In the end Portland might have to ditch MetroFi altogether, get someone else to run the network and expand it, or close it down.

Recently, Corpus Christi, Texas and Milpitas, California have taken over the networks built by EarthLink, which abandoned the municipal wireless market last year. Other cities such as Longmont, Colorado and Dublin, Ohio have brought in another service provider to take over a network abandoned by a previous service provider.