Comments on: Ponca City, Oklahoma blends municipal wireless with energy management

By: Jim Allen

Jim Allen — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:00:43 +0000

It is a good idea for those who need basic internet but if your counting on high speed not gonna happen in parts of town. The nodes that they have placed throughout town are going down losing signal strength. They talk you into buying a pepwave modem for around 160 then when you still drop signal they dont fix the nodes. Maybe some day it will be a great service but for now just good enough to send an email sometimes.

By: Another Concerned Reader

Another Concerned Reader — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:53:00 +0000

Just a note to say to all that reads to be to check out all available vendors and architecture before signing off on a new project. There are pros and cons to all systems. A system that works in one city may not work in another. Saying so openingly that one system is far superior to another is easy to do with no factual documentation and not signing your own name……

By: Concerned Reader

Concerned Reader — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:25:43 +0000

Unfortunately the person who wrote this article did not research the AMI system that is installed in Ponca City. The Ponca City AMI system does not use Tropos to collect or transmit water and electric meter data/readings. Honeywell did install the Tropos system in Ponca City after the completion of the of the AMI project. The AMI system that is installed in Ponca City is far superior to what is offered by Tropos and their metering/AMR partner.

By: Brian K. Ledbetter

Brian K. Ledbetter — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 15:51:07 +0000

I was recently in Ponca City over Christmas and noticed the Tropos radios around town. I was able to access the Free WiFi network and it seemed to work pretty good.

I am glad to see more networks going up. I also own a network, in Pryor, Oklahoma. I am currently using the Cisco 1522, and 1510 radio’s in a city wide deployment. We started the network in Dec 07 and it has been working great ever since. I agree with the comments about the wireless braodband services thriving in the rural areas over the metro.

By: Larry Karisny

Larry Karisny — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:33:44 +0000

This article gives a great insight to some real world savings in the efficient use of available public sector communication network assets. Ponca City has the advantage of owning their own fiber optic backbone but this is actually true for many cities and counties. There are thousands of miles of public sector wireless and fiber optic communication assets available in local public safety, water, electric and transportation network facilities all over the US. These communication assets often equal or even surpass in size to local private sector network infrastructure investment.

The problem with public sector network facilities is that they are often bought a point to point at a time for government departmental cost reduction purposes and are not shared between other agencies. This often leaves hundreds of multi-agency government network duplications and even entire local dark fiber spurs connected to nothing. Basically the network stops when the department runs out of money.

The key is to inventory all of these existing partially built public sector networks and then have multiple government entities leverage the advantages of sharing of these network infrastructures. Add a little public/private sector municipal wireless and you can light up an entire city. These shared networks can reduce city and county departmental network costs while lowering tax and utility costs to citizens. It looks like Ponca City gets it and demonstrates a real world and sustainable business model for municipal wireless.