Comments on: South Carolina city uses muni wireless for energy management, public safety, free WiFi

By: Best Communications Company You Don’t Know? | Smart Grids Blog

Best Communications Company You Don’t Know? | Smart Grids Blog — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:25:27 +0000

[...] MuniWireless article on Rock Hill, SC and its use of shared WiFi for AMI [...]

By: c jordan

c jordan — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:27:28 +0000

It’s wrong for Comporium to dictate what other businesses can and can not do for the residents. If RH wants to offer this as a free public service to residents, who is Comporium to say otherwise? There are people who can’t afford the outrageous prices that are charged for this service and with the prevalence of the internet anymore, it’s just wrong to oppose it. Network TV is free, so should be wifi.

By: Mark Simms

Mark Simms — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:51:23 +0000

The city has one of the best free coverage areas in the state. It’s just too bad the city only offers one home internet provider which has some of the highest rates in the country.
Comporium (the ISP) even against the vast majority of citizens voting against using Comporium the city counsel approved a new contract with them after some good ol’boy under the table wallet stuffing.

By: Jimmy Bagley

Jimmy Bagley — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:33:53 +0000

Steve has a great point regarding the cost of remote meter reading. Rock Hill has always found it difficult to solely justify the cost of a wireless broadband project on meter reading alone. When you consider the value of having municipal information and services (such as VOIP with softphones using a laptop) available in a true mobile environment, then the costs become much more justifiable. Having police officers in the field filing reports, researching warrants and outstanding arrests, running license plates, etc. certainly makes them more visible as well as more accessible and efficient. We have applications for the building inspectors to input data real time in the field so that contractors and office staff have instant access to the information. In addition there is an inherent opportunity to provide internet service for free as a hot spot to neighborhood parks, as we have done in Rock Hill, or you can consider becoming a full serivice Internet Service Provider to your customers as an additional funding source for your business model.

We are finding new uses of the wireless broadband as well as new cost saving measures using the wireless broadband virtually every day. The meter reading application is certainly one of our most beneficial applications because it also offers so much more regarding customer service with the outage reporting features and ability to give customers their usage data on a daily or hourly real time basis.

Rock Hill has certainly experienced good results and benefits from having a wireless broadband system as well as a fiber optic backbone and wireless backhaul. However, every city is different in terms of needs and functionality. I would encourage anyone interested to consider all the opportunities afforded by owning a wireless broadband solution.

By: Rory Conaway

Rory Conaway — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:14:21 +0000

Larry is correct on the duplications between departments. Cost justification is typically done by one department for one application. Bring them across multiple departments and at $3000 – $5000 per square mile installed (includes labor), just the vandalism and theft prevention alone pays for it. Add force multiplication, meter reading, reduced wireline data and voice applications, video analytics, etc…, and any city that doesn’t do it is wasting taxpayers dollars.

By: Larry Karisny

Larry Karisny — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:26:57 +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 Ponco City gets it and demonstrates a real world and sustainable business model for municipal wireless.

By: Steve Lamont

Steve Lamont — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:45:55 +0000

Interesting case study in Rock Hill. Powerful that the additive benefits of several applications contributed to a positive business case. This is an improvement over the “build it and they will come” mentality.
Just the same, I was under the impression that it is expensive to upgrade and install wireless power meters, that it is difficult to make a business case for that solely on the basis of being able to read meters more cheaply, and that the only way to get close to a business case was to have some time-of-day and surge-management pricing arrangements that required real-time meter reading.
Anyone know more about this and the business cases?