it is very clear that the City of Luxembourg has initiated this unique project and will keep the hands on the grips. The incumbent operator is one partner among other existing partners and can by no way harm the open business model designed right from the start by the City of Luxembourg. All ISPs and ASPs are invited to join the platform (cf existing guidelines on http://www.hotcity.lu) and offer their specific services to existing and future users. That’s the best way of guaranteeing a sustainable success for a municipal wifi project.

best regards,

Pol Goetzinger

The App. store is a good suggestion!

I have visited Luxembourg (on invitation by Cisco) last year and attended a seminar in city hall where the mayor gave a good presentation.

P&T Luxembourg’s decision to cooperate with the network was a defensive step, is what I understood unofficially. Luxembourg is surrounded by countries like Germany, Belgium and France and P&T was affraid that for example Deutsche Telekom would otherwise have entered their market. In fact this is a compliment for the way the city initiated the network. If you catch the attention of the incumbent(s) you at least do something right.

In fact is KPN Netherlands’ decision to cooperate with Volker Wessels in rolling out fiber a similar step. Volker Wessels is that strong financially that KPN must have realised that the roll out of fiber to the home would have happened anyway, with or without them.

Isn’t there anyone in Luxembourg who can run this network other than P&T Luxembourg? Or is this one of those politically expedient things to do because the incumbent has a lot of power in the government? I am sick and tired of politicians bowing down to the bullying tactics of incumbent operators!

A city that owns the underlying infrastructure – fiber, wireless or both – should ask a private firm to run it for them if the city cannot do it alone. But it should NOT be in the incumbent operator. The city should allow service providers to lease capacity on the network on a non-discriminatory basis so those service providers can serve their own customers. Luxembourg is doing this so that’s great — the separation of the infrastructure layer from the service layer.

As for services that will be offer on the free part of the network, the city’s portal, why not create something like an App store where the mayor lists the proposed applications and services and users get to vote on which ones they like and which ones they don’t like?