Philadelphia '05

Broadband Wireless: An Opportunity for Public-Private Partnerships

Rapidly increasing activity in the municipal broadband-wireless space has been well catalogued on the Amsterdam-based Web site muniwireless.com, founded in 2003 by Esme Vos. Her own site statistics suggest as much: In June 2004, Ms. Vos had 443 subscribers to her weekly newsletter, and by May 2005 some 1,900. She said she used to post one RFP every two months but is now posting one per week.

“People are rolling out networks at a frenzied pace,” she said. “I think a lot of cities are afraid that in their state there will be an anti-municipal broadband law, so they’re speeding up the rollout of networks both wired and wireless.” She added that partnering between the government and a private entity can mean the project falls outside an anti-muni-wireless state prohibition. In addition, the city can leverage the expertise of a variety of people, not only in infrastructure but in applications.

Cheryl Leanza, Principal Legislative Counsel for the National League of Cities, urged municipalities to think about how such partnerships might play in the political arena. “As a city, there are federal rules making sure you’re fair and equitable in terms of giving rights of way and not blocking competition. But sometimes in Washington, DC, local elected leaders are seen as stopping progress. If you decide that the best thing for the community is for the city to offer this itself, make sure this complies with the federal law and that you can’t be accused of blocking competition.”

Private-Sector Expertise

“I caution anyone going out there to try to build these networks,” said Tyler van Houwelingen, CEO & Founder, Azulstar Networks, with offices in Michigan and New Mexico. “You will fail the first 50 times you try it. It really is very difficult. It’s not about the network, it’s about the services and solutions benefiting the community.”

“There’s a lot involved,” said Todd Myers, President & CEO of Airpath Wireless, based in Waltham, Mass. “It isn’t necessarily the technology, it’s the business aspects that become a big challenge.” Airpath’s operating system handles subscriber administration as well as venue management for WISPs as well as clearing, roaming and settlement relationships with carriers as they bundle it into their subscriber bases. “You can keep the carriers happy by allowing their customers to roam on the network,” Myers said.

Myers urged municipalities to make it easy for local and regional ISPs to respond to RFPs. “There are so many different applications, it’s hard for city governments to update them themselves.” Ms. Vos said that the area is new and there’s not much expertise in writing RFPs. She hopes systems integrators and experts will hold master classes and seminars to write these RFPs properly to get a good network rolled out. If an RFP goes out and it’s unrealistic from a business perspective, service providers can go to property owners and bypass the RFP and usurp the whole city-led model anyway.

Atlanta FastPass (Georgia)

About three and a half years ago, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin embraced the concept of Atlanta FastPass, which has become a series of public-private partnerships recognizing that Wi-Fi is a LAN technology. The city sought a network manager to offer city-branded Wi-Fi services with a revenue share so no taxpayer dollars would be used. The resolution was approved in June 2004, and Biltmore Communications was awarded the contract six months ago.

Biltmore Communications, a service provider in the residential market in the Southeast, is creating one common platform for users in Atlanta by knitting together government buildings, universities, schools and private-sector businesses, as well as Biltmore’s preexisting clients, including condo 50–60 condominium complexes, the Georgia World Congress Center, and Wi-Fi networks at Georgia Tech and Georgia State. The first public hotspot, city hall, was lit up in December, and “full fruition of the network is expected by year’s end,” said Jeff Levy, Biltmore’s CEO and Founder.

In the universities, for example, private and public users can access the same network but with different IDs. “When conference attendees come to Georgia Tech, they simply access Wi-Fi through Atlanta FastPass,” he said. “Soon, one part of the footprint will begin to accommodate public safety.”

Large municipal networks can expect to confront interference, Levy warned. When Biltmore engineers deployed in downtown Woodruff Park, they picked up 42 separate networks. “With all of that interference in the air, it’s very challenging to set up in an unlicensed spectrum a network that keeps connectivity and the quality of service that you want,” Levy said. Smaller cities with fewer businesses, it may be less of an issue.

Levy noted a range of lessons learned:

• The mayor is very focused on this—that’s important.

• This model of public-private partnership does tend to avoid controversy.

• It’s possible to create a muni Wi-Fi network without dipping into the pockets of taxpayers.

• The neutral host model will be open to other providers on a roaming basis, so it’s not a proprietary franchise model.

Also, we’re working through a corporate sponsorship model; Wi-Fi for the park was provided by a downtown booster organization.
Hartsfield Airport is owned by the city, and Atlanta FastPass will become the splash page for visitors to the airport, the busiest in the world. In the first year, this will account for 80 to 90 percent of all revenue generated.

Additional revenue sources are corporate sponsorships and subscription-based access plans primarily for the enterprise that will give unified access where there’s free Wi-Fi, and discounted access at places seeking to charge. This is a network of networks, so many people control it and set prices or not—hotels, coffee shops, etc. Some are in control of the city and some are not.

Bay Broadband (Maryland)

The Delmarva Peninsula on the Eastern Shore of Maryland has towns but not cities and is similar to an area in Macedonia, which is heavily rural and mountainous with towns and only one city, said Allen Hammond, CEO & Founder of Bay Broadband and Vice President for Innovation at the World Resources Institute. Mr. Hammond advises US AID on its last-mile initiative. A commercial T1 on the Delmarva Peninsula goes for as much as $1,200 a month, “so you can see why we need to bring in inexpensive broadband. We’re doing it with an OC3-level wireless backbone that will be finished this summer.”

Bay Broadband has already built out Kent County on the peninsula with two dozen access points in parts of three counties. Bay Broadband has an MOU with the county that allows it to go on any public infrastructure, including grain elevators and commercial towers. It typically swaps tower space for broadband service with both county and municipal governments and currently serves all the county administrative offices, which switched over from a state free network called Network Maryland to Bay Broadband’s services “simply for reliability and the ability to get something fixed on a weekend.”

Bay Broadband has connected all the fire stations and provides an alternate path for emergency services. The county doesn’t pay Bay Broadband anything other than as a customer. “We provide all the funding,” Hammond said. “This is a private-sector venture, and this is the model we’re bringing to the rest of the Eastern Shore.

Bay Broadband uses pre-WiMAX and uncertified WiMAX gear because the region is heavily forested. Moreoever, three fourths of the households are outside incorporated towns. It’s almost exactly the same in Macedonia, where US AID has fostered a public-private partnership involving the ministers of schools and telecommunications, which put out RFPs to build out a nationwide wireless network. They expect to deploy something similar in scale with a WiMAX-type buildout that will cover every school and serve commercial, residential and public customers. “It’s a more traditional public-private partnership,” Mr. Hammond said, “where the public sector puts out an RFP and invites the private sector to invest in and manage the network.”

In Kent County, Maryland, it’s different, but the net effect is the same. “You’re getting the benefit of combining infrastructures and reducing redundancies and providing service to people who otherwise can’t get it. Nearly all our residential customers live beyond the reach of wireline providers, and they always will. Nobody’s going to build fiber to the home in areas like this. For most of the rural parts of the world, wireless plays an absolutely key role. We are going to provide not only broadband but voice, video and other services. So it’s a full-service model based over an Ethernet pipe.”

Caroline County (Maryland)

“I’ve heard about cities like Atlanta, but we can do the same thing in a rural county and we shouldn’t play second fiddle to anyone else when it comes to technology and Internet and bandwidth,” said Charles Cawley, Administrator, Caroline County, Maryland. “We can do it in a small rural, agricultural-based community.”

The county of 30,000 people is 50 miles long and narrow on Maryland’s Delmarva Peninsula. The county seat is Denton, with only 3,000 people, but that is projected to jump to 30,000 in the next decade. Cawley and his associates were able to build a 30-MB fiber network within the town limits and extend that to a three-tower network (800 Mhz). From there, the network has expanded with point-to-point and point-to-multipoint (900 Mhz) “so we’ve connected our fiber network with our wireless network.”

This network is all connected back to the state library system’s SAILOR network, which is federal-grant (i.e., e-Rate) and state-tax funded and can’t be used for private use. “We pay nothing in Caroline County for Internet access, and we have huge capacity there,” Cawley said. “The county has fiber to state buildings and is partnering with Network Maryland [another state network] to hook those up.”

The next challenge to bring the broadband to schools and other buildings. Moreover, Caroline County has no hospitals, and all EMS patients must be transported out of county, which raises jurisdictional issues with other counties and the State of Delaware, which has 800 Mhz.

“The Maryland Midshore has interoperability—among the best in the nation,” Cawley said. “What we have to do now is solve the data portion of that. We can send data on the go to the hospital because time is critical. We’re building a network of 900-Mhz back to the multipoint to the point-to-point so we will have data transmission live on the go to any hospital in the region. So that’s cooperation between three states and four to five counties. Caroline County is good at partnering. We have a regional college that’s five counties and a landfill that’s four counties.

Caroline County has spent $100,000 in state grants to build the fiber network. “I have an ingenious IT guy who I hired by installing gear in Afghanistan and he’s known for buying fiber out of the Internet,” Cawley said. “We want to extend the network around the schools, county seats, municipal governments. This year I want to build three more towers and expand the network. The possibilities of using the network are endless.”

For example, the county has problem with people dumping trash. “It’s hard to catch them, so you know there’s going to be cameras up in certain locations before it’s over with to catch those culprits. We’re in the process of building this network, and we’re going to get it done.”