MuniWireless

A hotly contested partisan effort to roll back property taxes in Florida is putting all local non-essential services on the line. That could spell trouble for muni-wireless networks there, including highly rated St. Cloud’s.

Florida city governments are fighting the proposal but it appears to have momentum in the state legislature. St. Cloud Mayor Donna Hart mentioned the situation in a post on Muniwireless.com a while back and I caught up with her this week to discuss its impact on St. Cloud.

The city council, she says, is awaiting word of how sizeable the impact will be but any significant loss of revenue would put all non-essential city services on the line. That includes CyberSpot, the city-owned Wi-Fi Internet access service St. Cloud offers free to residents.

“Things that are not absolutely necessary would have to be considered first so CyberSpot would be one of those,” Mayor Hart told me. “Would we be cutting the service? No, but maintenance and support might be an area we would cut.”

The network is presently operated and maintained by Hewlett-Packard under a contract with the city that the mayor estimates costs about $400,000 per year. Support and maintenance, she says, remain a point of contention among residents despite accumulating industry statistics on the network’s high rate of acceptance and superior performance.

The service is “very good in some areas. In some areas it’s more like dialup. Of course, we never said the service was going to be high-speed Internet,” she told me. Most of the complaints, she said, relate to technical support. “I don’t think the public is very patient on those items and I’m the one who gets those calls. I’m hearing a lot of frustration in town.”

The city’s fast growth adds to her concerns about future costs associated with the network. The city’s policy of extending service to newly annexed properties, the mayor said, should also be examined. Fees paid by developers offset the city’s cost of extending CyberSpot service to newly built residences. But the city has shouldered the cost of extending service to existing homes in newly annexed subdivisions. Hart estimates those build-outs have added $1 million to the cost of the network.

The city, she said, has not made extensive use of the network to support city services although it is testing public safety applications .”If they can save us some money, it would be wonderful.”

It seems to me, there are several issues here.

One is determining the true value of a network so that fair assessments can be made regarding its future. Jonathan Kleier, the project manager of Portland’s municipal wireless project, and I have had several recent discussions abut this. Portland has developed a set of metrics to monetize the cost savings to residents using the free network. Of course, this doesn’t put to rest complaints from unhappy customers. Providing technical support is no small matter in your average small business. Servicing tens of thousands of users across a municipality only magnifies the challenge.

There are issues of politics–at every level. Municipal budgets are subject to the vagaries of state and federal funding initiatives. As in Florida, politically motivated tax and spending cuts play havoc with the cities that must make difficult choices to cope with them. Changes at the local level , too, impact the perception and operation of the network; San Francisco demonstrated just how heated perceptual battles can get. Over time, it is likely that those who make serious decisions about the future of muni networks will be those who did not deploy them and who will pose serious questions about their continued operation. Upfront planning with sufficient public input will make that choice easier.

Finally, there’s the issue of municipal applications. Cities such as Riverside, Ca., have focused the priorities for their network on reducing costs and enhancing city services (such as public safety, meter reading, etc.) while addressing the digital divide and using excess capacity to provide service to residents. A number of consultants I spoke with at our recent conference in Dallas said that municipal applications are rapidly emerging as the most compelling motivation for deploying muni wireless networks.

As the backbone for those applications, the network is not a non-essential service but an indispensible part of the municipal infrastructure.

I invite your comments.