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05/09/2006Riverside, Calif., Taking Multipurpose to the Max
The City of Riverside, California, has issued an RFP for a citywide broadband-wireless network to be built out through a public-private agreement across 86 square miles. The network will accommodate multiple public and private user groups, a bevy of local-government applications, a separate 4.9-GHz solution for public safety, and free access (1 MB). City of Riverside Chief Information Officer Steven Reneker fielded questions about the city’s plan and how the planning process was inspired. A bidder’s conference is scheduled for May 18.
 How did the city build consensus around its broadband-wireless plan?
The Mayor put together SmartRiverside, a 501(c)3, with the objective of making the city smarter from both a high-tech and an economic development standpoint—really, to provide an infrastructure in the city that supports the attraction and retention for a technology park that we’ve developed in conjunction with the university and the county, especially with the nanotechnology companies in our area in mind. We’re not really looking at trying to attract large-scale business, but to grow new development projects right here.
We also wanted to conquer the digital divide. As part of our Parks & Recreation Department, individuals can go through a training class and get a free computer—trickle-down systems from the City and County. We had the issue of getting these residents on the Internet, and Wireless Riverside is meant to blanket our entire city—similar to the City and County of San Francisco.
You also have a lot of students at U.C. Riverside.
On top of the 280,000 population, over 40,000, and, of course, we want to keep these students here after they graduate.
Our digital-divide effort is also aimed at people who can’t afford a PC in the house. We’re going to strongly encourage working with Intel’s Digital Communities initiative. HP and Dell have also set up PC and laptop programs ($500–$600, depending on which) with wireless access cards with financing at $22 per month for three years. We would prefer people to go down that route, because the device is under warranty and there is customer service.
But there are some households that can’t afford even that, so we want to give them an option. We have an agreement with Affiliated Computer systems to capture trickle-down computers from our county and city that we’re going to filter here. Community centers will have drop-off points as will. Our CURE program is a recycling effort. Everything we collect we get four cents on the pound, and it’s disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.
Did any particular city department request this network?
Our public-safety personnel are on a Motorola legacy network, and the speeds we could do at 4.9 GHz made sense. We had already pulled the licenses, and with all the hardware providers out there we knew we could do a tri-band network.
As you were preparing the RFP, did any other city capture your imagination?
The one that stands out is the San Francisco model. We watched Philadelphia closely, but it was disappointing to see Verizon end it up in a lawsuit and cause such a hurdle. We’re fortunate to be in a state where we have the ability to go ahead and proliferate broadband wireless. The city doesn’t want to settle for Philadelphia or Anaheim model—whether it’s a lower cost model. The real issue is how do we do something that benefits the whole community and make it free at up to 1 MB.
Who will make the selection?
We expect responses to be back by mid-July and to make an award by the August time frame. We expect that the universities and local CEOs will also participate in the selection. The local business community has come up with some good ideas.
To what extent have incumbent providers expressed concern?
We made sure the city is not providing competition to the carriers. We will, of course, be competing with somebody—but we talked up our RFP to all our providers in the city before we released it. Anybody that’s already here—Charter, ATT, Verizon, Sprint Nextel—is encouraged to respond. But a lot of these just don’t have a model yet.
The city will be able to bring some significant assets to the table for the purposes of a public-private agreement.
Owning our own electric and water utilities makes it easier. Rather than charge an access fee to city facilities, we wanted to make sure we can provide them at no cost to whomever owns the RFP.
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