Plenary: Public-Private Partnerships PanelPanel Summary: Public-Private Partnerships
This plenary session panel made up of local-government professionals and incumbent and emerging service provider executives explored the opportunities for innovative public-private partnerships, with an emphasis on leveraging local governments as anchor tenants to improve mobile workforce productivity and share excess capacity for broadband digital inclusion. Panelists discussed deployment economics, location-based advertising models to generate revenue, vertical assets such as light and power poles, and spectrum interference and privacy and security issues. The panel was chaired by Mayor Kenneth S. Fellman, Arvada, Colorado, and Chair, Information & Technology Committee, National League of Cities. Panelists included: Dianah Neff, Chief Information Officer, City of Philadelphia; Dave Heck, Deputy Chief Information Officer, City of Tempe, Arizona; Martin Levetin, Vice President, Eastern Region, WAZMetro; Chuck Haas, Founder & CEO, MetroFi; Tony Abell, CEO, Last Mile Communications; Nitin Shah, Chief Executive Officer, Feeva.
Ken Fellman: I've been to a lot of telecom conferences over the years, but this is the first one specifically for wireless, and it's an honor for me to be here and be here with this distinguished panel.
[Two-minute introductions.]
Anthony Abell: We have a little different perspective on the last-mile space. From our point of view, ownership can be common and jointly and severally served. We've moved a lot of the commercial content into last-mile space by caching memory inside the local infrastructure. This creates different commercial models that others-public sector-can share in.
We're also very much focused on public safety and security, and we see ourselves producing a very high-bandwidth system, whereby we can share those benefits both with the network providers, in a network neutral model, and also the service providers. From our point of view, we are a disruptive enabler…. A new model starts to open up. We can refresh the parts that others can't. That's the last-mile model…moving caching technology to the edge of the network. Intelligence at the edge.
Martin Levetin: WAZMetro is our wireless access zone city brand that we use. The company's name is NeoReach Wireless, a wireless service provider focused on the municipal market. Our business model in particular is to provide, own, and operate wireless networks in cities. We operate on a wholesale model; we provide and operate generally Wi-Fi-based infrastructure, metro-scale, and we provide the capability for a variety of ISPs to offer services to end users over our open platform. So it's a wholesale service model.
The other aspect of our business model is that we generally like to exchange bandwidth or service accounts for the municipalities for access to the public vertical assets to the town. We're deploying our first wholesale wireless network in the city of Tempe, AZ, and our second deployment will be in the city of Sacramento, and we're very excited about that as well.
Chuck Haas: Last weekend was my ninth anniversary in the residential broadband business. I was cofounder of Covad Communications, which is the sole remaining broadband provider. MetroFI is a designer, builder and operator of metro-fi or city-owned Wi-Fi networks, and many of you took a tour of Cupertino's network yesterday. We spent the first two years figuring out the network and business model. The technology does work. We have happy customers. And the business model works, as well, though the public-private partnership, with the public side being the anchor tenant, is the one that will be the most successfully deployed.
Nitin Shah: I'm with Feeva, a small wireless software company based in San Francisco. With any Wi-Fi network powered by Feeva's technology, we're able to identify, target, and deliver useful and relevant content for a user, and yet we preserve that anonymity and privacy of that user. So we're very much a software company, and for the past two years we've been working with the city of San Francisco, where we've deployed a number of pilot networks, and we've demonstrated that we can substantially improve not only the user experience but also the economic viability of public access Wi-Fi networks.
Dave Heck: Tempe is actually deploying a border-to-border Wi-Fi network. I look at us as digital cowboys. We're going to get on this thing, and if it bucks us off, we're going to get back on this thing and tame it. The city of Tempe is in the Phoenix metro area, and we border Scottsdale, Phoenix, Mason, and Chandler, all of which have publicly stated that they are watching Tempe to see how this rolls out, so this is a very important deployment, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Dianah Neff: We have awarded a contract to EarthLink, and I'm going to share that as part of my presentation. I wanted to talk about some of the business-model scenarios that we looked at. What we've done in Philadelphia may not fit every other community, but there are common threads. One is choosing your business-model scenario. I recommend doing a stakeholder analysis to find out what is critical to your community and how you want to go about determining the business model. Philadelphia Dianah Neff: There are a number of models out there. There are public-community business models. There are private consortiums; we had a couple that bid on ours. Government moves out of the way; they come in, put up the network, but they wanted no barriers. There is the cooperative-wholesale model which is the model that Philadelphia has gone with, and that you've heard in a number of other communities. There's the cross-sectional-we're a hybrid, a nonprofit corporation created by a municipal government and a cooperative wholesale model with a public-private partnership.
Then there's the public utility and authority. Chaska, MN, and Scottsburg, IN, are classic examples of that. I met the mayor from Adel, GA, where their community owns and operates its own utility and is doing a Wi-Fi utility as part of that. There are some things that you need to take a look at.
In Philadelphia we have an executive committee with 17 different stakeholders. Mayor Street, based on input in our business plan, incorporated Wireless Philadelphia as a 501(c)3 as a nonprofit corporation to oversee the project. What we heard from our community focus group is that they wanted it to be outside the political process, so that as mayors changed, there wasn't this concern about the whether the network would be survivable.
So this was something that was loud and clear from our community and something we thought would be beneficial to creating the nonprofit, and it also allowed the nonprofit to set up its social goals and programs and to focus on that and not be constrained by city budgets so if there weren't more critical services that needed to be provided we weren't worried about the revenue streams to support and maintain our network going forward.
Originally, we had looked to own the network ourselves about a year ago now. Last December, we submitted the business plan to the administration for review, and at that time there weren't companies standing up and saying, count on us, we'll be there to fund your project. We had written our RFP, issued last April, on the premise we would have Wireless Philadelphia be the owner of the network, but we included in that RFP a section for alternate proposals, so if companies did change their mind, and we're very happy that they did, and they would actually bring funding to the table to build the network, that we would be able to do that.
We received 12 proposals, and this was last June, and you can see the landscape is growing since last June. San Francisco announced it got 26 proposals, so this is gaining speed in the business community, and more people are looking at this from a business perspective, and believe that there are business ROIs out there, and this does make sense.
In partnering with the private sector, we bring to the table the ability to have the feet on the street. We know our community, nonprofits, faith-based organizations, and what we found from our pilots. When you marry the strength of the private sector in running and operating the business with the knowledge of the community, whether that's through a nonprofit or the city itself, you can have a very good partnership.
We're very excited. We had some great companies respond. Our three finalists included AT&T, BelAir, and Lucent; HP, Tropos, and Alvarion; and EarthLink, Motorola Canopy, Tropos. So we got some very good quality, very different. One consortium was led by an ISP that is now stepping up to build the network. We had a traditional carrier with AT&T being the lead. And we had an integrator, HP, stepping up to be lead of that consortium. We had eight consortium groups that bid on our proposals. Three of those were alternate proposals. The others were the more traditional model where Wireless Philadelphia would have funded, through other sources, the building of that network. So there is a lot of interest and there are a lot of options to look at and consider as you move forward.
We are looking at having open access. A common question I receive is whether EarthLink will be our only ISP. No. In our RFP, we specified an open-access network, and EarthLink embraces this. They've created a muni networks division within EarthLink which will actually run the network. And EarthLink will be one of multiple ISPs that will have access and pay a wholesale fee to EarthLink, the network operator, who will do a revenue-share back to Wireless Philadelphia.
We will have the contract with the city on access to the poles and be working with EarthLink and other ISPs in our communities. We estimate we'll still be able to bring the price in around $20 and will have a low-income rate of around $10 in our digital inclusion program. By setting our wholesale rates low, it will enable a number of options not only in Internet service providers but in application providers.
I've been very pleased with the number of businesses that have approached us that want to do value-added services on top of the basic service. For Wireless Philadelphia and the City of Philadelphia it is our concern that we have basic access at an affordable rate for everyone and that we will also use this as an economic development tool to bring in these value-added services. And as people find value in them, they will pay an additional fee for whatever those services may be. One of the interesting ones we've heard of is a company that wants to come in and do tracking of released prisoners but at a much lower cost. We have overcrowded jails, and this is an opportunity to meet a need that we have there.
We've received a number of foreign-investment offers for new applications in transportation and pure marketing, so it does spur economic development. We have 300,000 college graduates in Philadelphia; a number are excited about staying in Philadelphia and launching their own ventures rather than joining large corporations, or moving out of Philadelphia. We think that what we've projected in our business plan is coming through, and we're very excited about this partnership. Tempe, Arizona Dave Heck: I've been in Tempe for 19 years-20 years in December. I understand our city very well. This project has been the highlight of my career and I'm really enjoying it.
Tempe is about 160,000 strong and growing. The downtown area is going upward; we're putting in a few high-rise buildings which presents some challenges. The median age is 28, and we're the home of ASU, one of the top five largest universities in the country. After 2001, we had a downturn, and the numbers for 2005 look better. The downtown area is really the crown jewel of Tempe-restaurants, nightclubs, residential and new facilities for ASU and research.
The city has 1,640 employees and 300 seasonal employees. ASU in the middle of Tempe brings another 60,000 people to our population every year, bumping us up to 220,000. We are a council/city manager form of government. We do have quite a bit of technology; everybody has a desktop; all police officers have laptops. We have a robust infrastructure. We have a lot of fiber optic in the ground, and we have point-to-point microwave links, and are rolling out e-gov applications.
Goals: We wanted to cover 40 square miles with ubiquitous wireless broadband and provide an alternative to DSL and cable modem services and spur competition. We wanted to offer free Wi-Fi in certain areas of Tempe, particularly the downtown corridor to spur economic development, and that tends to be where all the college students hang out and do their homework at the coffee shops. And we wanted to promote the use of the city Web site for e-gov, and offer free access to ASU online services. Those two domains had to be free.
We wanted to provide mobility for Tempe municipal employees, and part of the requirements were that there would be a free municipal network, and to enhance the ability of public-safety employees.
And we wanted to promote economic development in Tempe. "Tempe is the smart place to be."
Possible solutions included the following: 1. To build a network totally owned and operated by the city, and the city would pay for the cost of installation and operation, and we would receive the revenue.
2. Public-private partnership, where we would install the network and contract the operation and maintenance out to a wireless provider.
3. Public-private agreement, would offer the resources to entice the construction of a public network and then that would be used to deliver municipal services. The install cost is the WISP is the operational expense is the WISP and revenue is the WISP, but what the city gets out of it is the use of the network. And #3 is what we chose.
Business model: To create a municipal network and deploy it on the same platform as the public network. The agreement called for designated areas of free service within the community and access to government and educational sites, and the city would allow the WISP access to vertical assets which in Tempe is streetlights. Benefits to the city include use of the wireless network. Every police officer has a laptop and would be able to use that in the field. It includes access to the city's Web site from a freestanding page. This provides an unprecedented communication between our citizens and the city council and the mayor.
Vendor selection: It needed to be a mesh design and provide voice, data, and video services. It had to have a customer service model. And the building penetration needed to penetrate every first wall in the community with redundancy and backup.
Applications: Currently, in the police department, we plan to use it to upload reports and graphics, and provide access to e-mail. Currently all officers come into a substation to upload reports. Apps include ACIC/NCIC access in the patrol car, special event communication and monitoring with IP cameras, and on-the-fly incident command centers.
We do have several command center vehicles. One is a first-responder type van, the other is a trailer that we haul out, and these will hook into the Wi-Fi network. GIS on trucks. Hazmat materials databases. Well and tank monitoring. Meter reading. Our utility workers are using CDPD which will be replaced by the Wi-Fi network. Public works: fleet management, AVL, cameras on trash trucks to identify repairs. We're deploying light rail which will have access. Parks maintenance and lighting. Code compliance and building inspection, and general government telecommuting and network access for tax auditors.
Economics: The city has no out-of-pocket capital expense. The ongoing expense is limited to electricity charges for these pole-top radios, which is about the same as a 40W bulb. The wireless provider is responsible for all the maintenance and upkeep. Funding comes entirely form the service provider's capital. Our service agreement guarantees use of the municipal network for the life of the agreement. And the service provider revenue comes from residential and business subscribers.
Deployment: We put out an RFI almost two years ago. Tempe and ASU did a downtown pilot where we put out about a dozen access points in the downtown and opened it up for free access. In the agreement with NeoReach, we can add and detract the light poles as needed. And we can change locations for better coverage. The agreement is renewable for two additional five-year terms to ensure the contract has a healthy ROI.
Timeline: The project was begun in January 2004 with a briefing to the council on the benefits of a Wi-Fi project. We then studied vendors and technology and worked with the university on a proof of concept. We put out an RFI. We did the pilot project and reviewed the responses to the RFI. In January 2005 we put out an RFP for the citywide project and began evaluating it. The council awarded the contract to NeoReach in August. The first radios were deployed in the downtown later that month.
Phase 1 is nearing completion with 80 radios deployed right now. Next month we're doing a big media event with the mayor and Senator John McCain. We did the project in five phases, and they should all be complete by the first part of 2006. The impact has been overwhelmingly positive. We get 10 to 15 calls requesting more information and how to sign up. The city has been very pleased with the efforts so far.
Lessons learned: It was difficult for WISPs to see the vision of build it and they will come. We got only five responses to our RFP, and indication that folks didn't know if this was going to fly. It's critical that municipalities have access to their light poles, because without that you don't have a lot of verticality to deploy it. Support from the mayor and council is critical, especially if you have departments in silos that don't communicate very well. Discussion and Q&A Ken Fellman: I've got two points to make. On the last panel, a question was asked about federal legislation and the future of municipal broadband. I wish I was as optimistic as the previous speakers about the timeline. After years both in my city and on behalf of municipal clients, I am experienced or jaded enough to not believe that anything of substance is going to get passed right before an election. I think it will be two years before we see anything passed. There are two bills, in both houses, that permit or preempt municipal broadband.
If you think that municipal broadband should be preserved, each of you should write to your congressman or senator and explain why this is a good idea and why they need to be on our side. You need to get your members of Congress to agree that they won't add their name to the sponsors of the bills that will preempt municipal broadband. I can't emphasize enough how important this is. When the local governments are up there and these guys know it, the response we get from the Congresspeople who are buying into the SBC and Verizons and their pitch is that you just want to compete unfairly and you've got an unlevel playing field because you're the city and you can control how this is going to go and keep competitors out, and we need our friends in the industry who support this to be lobbying on these issues. Business Models On the panel before that, Greg Richardson gave us the question I'd like to start with, which is, when he was talking about the model, you should ask, why are you doing this, because really there is no proven model for Wi-Fi that works. Anyone want to jump in?
Chuck Haas: One, there's a big market. Cupertino has an Internet TAM of $7 million, and I spent $250,000 to access that TAM. These are very economical networks, and they're accessing a very large market. But that doesn't ensure success. Customers don't just sign up, especially where there are strong DSL and cable incumbents spending hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising. The best environment is where there are anchor tenants from the city that will use the network and help mitigate some of the private-sector risk that my investors and I take. Some providers will succeed, others not. Don't paint everybody with the same brush.
Martin Levetin: A number of factors usually coalesce to create new market opportunities. The factors relevant here are the evolution of wireless mesh technology, in particular, which makes it possible to cover very large areas with reasonable economics. Second, the growing dependence on access to the Internet and on mobility and, from the municipal side, a strong interest in finding a single infrastructure to support both public access and private and public-safety facilities. All these are converging-not to mention, if you're a retail ISP trying to get access to your customers over existing wireline facilities with increasing difficulty, you might argue that there's a motivation on the part of the content providers for an alternative infrastructure.
We've been looking at this for some two years now, and all these market factors have coalesced to produce an opportunity for municipalities to bear the fruits of what we think is a revolution, and for service providers to provide a third infrastructure. Technology has a way of changing the nature of the universe, and I think the combination of Wi-Fi and wireless mesh has produced an opportunity to do this, and we're very excited about this.
Nitin Shah: My company's very much focused on the end user and their experience on any network. Our view is called personal broadband. With Wi-Fi devices, in homes and offices, once the user is away from those locations, they're disconnected. The number of shipments of of Wi-Fi devices is projected to be well over a few hundreds of millions of devices. There's a demand from the marketplace to be connected. We believe that the use of municipal Wi-Fi networks is a way to keep people connected wherever they area.
What we find is that the economics of traditional public-access Wi-Fi are tough, despite the very low cost structure. On the other hand, if you use a more traditional approach of targeted advertising, then you can start to inject a new form of cash into this equation. So a combination of lots of Wi-Fi devices, people who use them and roam around, and then an advertising model both for the user and advertiser is where we see the economics work. It's a stimulus to our whole industry to combine these technologies and make a profitable business out of that.
Anthony Abell: I'd certainly like to add a bit to that. The personal broadband is something that's going to be happening now with convergence. We see that the concept of the bigger, better, faster Internet has some commercial flaws in it. It's reliant on session charging and people to buy into that system. But there are other commercial drivers that get missed in the linear development of a lot of the thinking that's out there right now. There's the aspect of common ownership and advertising. We end up paying for all the advertising we quite often receive across the Internet. When we get spammed and content is downloaded on the push model.
But there are other models out there, and the advertising helps to pay for the very systems we're looking for here. If we look at what's being done within the mesh systems, the mirco cells, pico cells, all these systems start to bring information closer and closer to the end user and they start to change the dynamics of how we pay for that.
Others are starting to want to layer different commercial services onto this, and the trick for the municipalities is to spot this before it happens and to realize this ownership is not just a capex or an opex they pass on to someone else in return for some free services. I think there's an opportunity for an ongoing annuity stream for the municipalities, something that adds value to the community as well as meeting the social inclusion goals, the better networks that the municipalities are looking for, and it would be a shame to miss out on those.
Dianah Neff: I agree with all these gentlemen. And there are a couple of others the munis need to look at. In Philadelphia, we get 25 million visitors annually. Think about the 1% that want access to wireless anywhere they go in your community, and the potential that that market stream can bring to you, particularly as more cities get involved and visitors get used to that access. It helps your restaurants and entertainment establishments. It makes your low-income neighborhoods viable. If you have an independent pharmacist who wants to do a community letter to those people who live and shop in his neighborhood, this is a perfect opportunity to allow that community neighborhood building while using advertising revenues to help support that.
Along with the roaming, we've got people who spend big bucks on a monthly basis to have wireless access in limited locations wherever they travel. Well, if you can partner with some of those companies to allow roaming within your citywide wireless, it's a win-win, with your hotels. If you're paying $9.95 a day to have wireless access, how about a small uplift fee so that that guest will have access to wireless anywhere they go within your community. That helps your business establishments, that doesn't cut the hotels out of their market of having wireless in, because we're not penetrating into the rooms, but it's a value added that you can add for visitors who come to your communities.
Dave Heck: No one model fits all. Look at the community and see what it will bear and see what model works best. Tempe, the model chosen there fits it best. It's centered around a very large university and students will want access wherever they happen to be. The company has the potential to make a lot of revenue. Vertical Assets Ken Fellman: Dave had mentioned that it really helped that Tempe owns the light poles. In Philadelphia, the light poles are also owned by the city. In many cities around the country, there's a private investor-owned electric utility that owns the light poles. How much harder is it to make a public-private partnership work if you have that third party that has to be part of the mix to deploy the network?
Chuck Haas: In Silicon Valley, where we deployed, PG&E owns the power so there's already a third party in the mix. It does make it more difficult. The reality is that it's not the city that companies like MetroFi are negotiating with, it's the local power company or whoever owns the assets. Vertical assets are required to deliver a quality carrier-grade network. There are other models of deploying on rooftops that don't pass the carrier-grade network test. But this is already a complex business, and the more complexity you heap on this?companies like mine will go to areas that are easy first, and areas that are hard later, so the easier the city can make it for private enterprise to be successful, the better.
Martin Levetin: Certainly, if the city owns all the light poles, it simplifies the process of deployment. If you have a public utility owning light poles, power poles, etc.-in many cases you find out there's a mix-then it complicates it because you have another entity to work with, but I think it's manageable. Many of these poles have different attributes. Some of them are gang switched. When the sun comes up, the power goes off, which adds another layer of complexity. And there are other places where, for esthetic reasons, people have not elected not to have vertical assets of this sort. There will be areas where it will be extremely difficult to deploy networks of this sort. But just having an additional public utility to deal with adds a layer of complexity, but it certainly doesn't break the business model.
Anthony Abell: Last Mile was approached some time ago where a certain former eastern European country had a lot of lampposts. After a shutdown of one of the state monopolies, one of the individuals owned all the lampposts in his country, and integrating these types of services enabled him to become his country's second biggest telephone operator. So there's a stark warning for the way that the past lies ahead. So, the lampposts are there, and I think there are really positive economic drivers, particularly with convergence, that will drive adoption. Competing with DSL and Cable Ken Fellman: We need to get a little disagreement among the panel. I talked to Nitin beforehand, so I know his position. If you already have DSL or cable modem service being offered in your community, is it viable from a business standpoint to do a wireless broadband network throughout your city and expect that that service is going to be purchased by residential subscribers?
Nitin Shah: Here's my disclaimer. I come from the dark side. [Audience laughs.] I've worked in the cellular industry for 15 years, and I've always dealt with licensed spectrum technologies, have bought spectrum, traded spectrum, set up network operations using licensed spectrum, so when I look at the unlicensed spectrum assets and worry about technology-a number of issues with availability of service and so on-I still have not been able to convince myself that using Wi-Fi technology for carrier-grade residential access is completely viable if you just assume that you can do that as a direct competitor to DSL or cable.
Now, it depends a great deal on your pricing, business model, what revenue streams (like advertising) are able to subsidize that, so at least my historical perspective had been very much around Wi-Fi as a residential or office technology. What we've seen is several things. One is the technology for public-access Wi-Fi-some of these mesh technologies-have been amazing, the capabilities that have put in there. I'm much more willing to be less skeptical. But my experience is that these technologies are tough to deal with, and as we see larger-scale deployments, I see that there's an inflection point over the next 6 to 12 months where some of these Wi-Fi based technologies may be viable, but I come from a history of the licensed frequency bands.
Martin Levetin: You need to think of this platform as a platform for more than a single service. If you're thinking of it as Internet access only, put on your subscriber hat. If it's $14 or $15 DSL, the question is, what do you gain by going to a wireless service offering? For one thing, you've got mobility, and that's becoming an increasingly important component in our lives. But if you look at in just in that context, from a subscriber point of view, you're thinking of it too narrowly. Because in from the side here is coming the VoIP revolution.
One of the gentlemen from a municipality on an earlier panel said all the police officers were using cellular and he was looking forward to the day when he could use VoIP over a Wi-Fi network as a cost reduction for his city. Well, imagine if you're a subscriber, there are already VoIP offerings out there. This Boingo hotspot-$8 a month for VoIP-so you're now in a situation in which you have bundled services: single-, double-, triple-, quadruple-plays. Certainly VoIP plus Internet access is a convenient double play, and if you look at the service offering in that context, it certainly, for a service provider, raises the [inaudible] which is a number that our investors like to think about, and as a consumer it gives you a bundled package which may well be more price attractive than what you're paying to the other providers. And if you add mobility to that piece, I think you may have a very interesting proposition for the customer.
Chuck Haas: Martin addressed a lot of the revenue/economic side, and I absolutely agree with that. If it's just Internet access, I'd take my investors' money and open a Togo's [sandwich shop] because I'd probably get a better return on investment, which is the name of the game in private enterprise. But the other piece of the question is technology and licensed versus unlicensed spectrum. Just throwing up access points is destined to fail. You have to engineer the network to take the realities of unlicensed spectrum and get it to perform at a level that's as good or better than DSL or cable. And this isn't the mythical 5.9's-cable modems and DSL are far from 5.9's-maybe you get 3.9's if you're lucky. That's our target, and I believe that's where this technology can lead you, but only if you engineer it correctly, which is multiple radios. I wish I could afford a four-radio module like the Motorola guys have. I use two, and probably in a year or two I'll probably be able to use three at the same or less price. That's the nature of standards-based technology. And second, you need to use directional antennas. The gentleman from the FCC-you know, they give us 8 more dB. dB's are important, especially in a backbone network. But more importantly I can filter out the interference around me by having highly directional, almost point-to-point links in my backbone. So even though there's a lot of noise around the city, I have high-quality links for my backbone mesh.
Anthony Abell: We're watching, at BT, which is now increasingly changing to wireless links between exchanges, and for growing their existing fixed cable systems. That's a cleaner signal, less degradation. We're starting to see greater and greater capability?with these directional antennas. I don't think it will be too long before we see some of these systems outperforming even the fiber-optic systems. Now, that's very hard for the DSL boys to compete against. And we have a much lower cost of ownership and install. You don't have to dig up the ground if you're doing a wireless link or canopy. When we're looking at the San Francisco model, Wi-Fi is here. There is demand out there. Expectations are rising. Within a municipal environment, to coin a phrase, give the people what they want. The big thing is to make sure the environment-political, commercial-can exist for that, and some of the models I've seen on both sides can let that happen. Spectrum Interference Question: For Dianah and for Dave, it's unlicensed spectrum. Aren't you worried about interference. And, if somebody is operating a Wi-Fi network, it's possible to know and keep records of where all the users were at any given time, by triangulating between the access points. Are you concerned about privacy?
Dianah Neff: The answer is yes to both of those. But there are ways that you can mitigate that. As with any type of network that you have to go into, I recommend that you do a RF analysis in your community to find out where the interference is. There are multiple channels. You can work around it. You do need to work with people that may already have wireless in their communities. Security and privacy are important to us. In our RFP, we had a whole page-17 different layers-of security that we asked the vendors to respond on.
We're looking at security at the network, at the application level, but also it's a part of what we're doing in our education and working in the community-educating the end user on what they need to do to make sure they have a personal fire wall. If they're going to put a router in their house, they need to understand what they need to do, because you can only protect at the ISP and network and application level. If somebody leaves their system open and unprotected, and they may come back and say, well, it's your fault, and we're building into that an educational process what personal responsibility the end user has, as well as putting requirements on our ISPs for spam blockers and spyware, and for the network people to build in multiple layers-VPNs-and having those capabilities built into the network.
Dave Heck: One of the things we looked at and was important to us was that the hardware, and radios themselves, be field upgradeable to 4.9. We have applied for and received a 4.9 license. I think initially we're not going to see interference and contingency, but down the road as you start getting more users, that may become a problem, and at that point we can start deploying these 4.9 radio into the field and eliminate the potential for interference. As far as security, the city is doing most of that from the client and server end. We've partnered with a company called <PadCom>. They provide the VPN security at the client end so it's a very secure tunnel.
Ken Fellman: Let me leave you with this thought. Most of you will get a letter back saying thank you for your comments?. Do not accept that as an answer. Follow up with a phone call to the local office and ask to meet with the staff person who does telecom and explain it to them. If you've dealt with these issues before, they will try to make it seem like they are listening to you and not make any kind of commitment. We must make collectively make our voices heard if we're going to win this legislative battle.
|
