Certain Silence

Yeah, I know, you think New York is way better than Boston.

Boston’s got a better football team.

Try answering this question about your favorite municipal wireless deployment: Who provides the backhaul?

All these wireless access points are sexy and all, but they are only ever part of the solution. Eventually they’ve got to carry their traffic back to the big bad Internet, and in general that’s not being done on your neighbor’s DSL line, with a couple of notable exceptions. You need a way to carry the aggregated bandwidth from your access points, which can add up. If you’re building a municipal network, this is a really big deal: even the most expensive access radios are way cheaper than laying fiber or even installing high bandwidth point to point fixed wireless links. St. Cloud, Florida uses Motorola’s Canopy system for backhaul, and supposedly it works great in a town where the land is flat and there aren’t a lot of tall buildings to block lines of sight. But what about Corpus Christi and Chaska, two other muni darlings? As it turns out, both cities own their own fiber optic rings, Corpus Christi on its own, and Chaska through the city-owned utility. Toronto’s much touted wifi network uses the fiber optic network of Toronto Hydro’s telecommunications subsidiary. A city’s ownership of their own fiber optic network radically changes the economics of constructing and operating a municipal network.

There’s a regulatory side of this too. Some cities with their own fiber networks negotiated them as part of franchise agreements with cable operators, but others only have the right to use the cable companies’ own lines for free or at a discount, and then only for government purposes. You can imagine how successful efforts to get the local cable company to allow use of those lines for a muni deployment have been.  One of the likely downsides of efforts to streamline the franchising process is that cities will no longer have the leverage to negotiate for perks like these. A second angle involves the Federal governfiber access points for a municipal network.

I’m only just remembering how to blog, so if you expect this narrative to go anywhere you’ll likely be disappointed. It’s frustrating to find so little written in the muni wifi press on these basic facts that have such a huge impact on the success or failure of muni networks.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: muniwifimuniwireless chaska stcloud fon meraki backhaul