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Philly's
wireless net gets a lot more complicated
By
John Cox
Network
World, 04/21/05
A
study commissioned by the City of Philadelphia has concluded
that residential and business users will need more than a
WLAN card plugged into their PC to access the proposed citywide
wireless net, originally estimated to cost $10 million.
That's
according to an online
report by TMCnet's Robert Liu, who sat in on an information
meeting hosted this week by city officials for vendors eager
to bid on the contract.
Liu doesn't
spell out what will be needed for this customer premises equipment,
but Glenn Fleishman, a fan of municipal wireless broadband,
says it probably means a WLAN bridge with a high-gain antenna.
Fleishman offers his reasoning why this won't add greatly
to the overall cost of the net, partly because you can buy
bridges for "only" $100, and probably less in large
quantities.
And large
quantities is what we're talking about: 26,000 small businesses
and 560,000 households (the numbers cited by Philadelphia
CIO Diana Neff). Multiply that by $100 or even $50 and you're
starting to look at something like real money.
But Fleishman
doesn't address two other points. One, mentioned by Lui, citing
a study by wireless equipment maker TeleCIS, is the separate
installation costs -- actually setting all this stuff up and
getting it to work. The second and related point: the possible
impact of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of bridges on
network and customer support costs and complexities.
Liu also
reports that the city-commissioned study warned that "intense
planning" will be needed to create a viable RF infrastructure.
While the city has some of the information necessary to do
that, such as street lines, curb lines and light poles, other
information is sketchy (building footprints are only current
as of 1996) or non-existent (no information about building
heights).
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