Visit the New
Rules Project

Wireless (and Wired) Minneapolis Main Page

Minneapolis Wireless News - Subscribe by emailing
becca@ilsr.org

Is a Publicly Owned Minneapolis Information Network A Wise Public Investment?

Minneapolis Wireless Broadband Initiative Information Packet - neighborhood and community groups

City Council Actions on the Wireless Broadband Initiative

City Working Group Reports

Minneapolis Broadband RFP

Ten Myths About A Publicly Owned Information Network in Minneapolis, and the Facts

David Morris and Becca Vargo Daggett on municipal broadband - December 6, 2005, Wendy Wilde Show, Air America Minnesota (Part 1 and Part 2)

Ownership Matters With Wireless Systems - published November 15, 2005 in the Pioneer Press

Publicly Owned Broadband Would Serve Minneapolis Best - published August 1, 2005 in the Star-Tribune

Who Will Own Minneapolis' Information Highways? a fact sheet - August 2005

Who Will Own Minnesota's Information Highways? - a white paper from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, June 2005

Wireless (and Wired) Minneapolis

Power, water, connectivity;
City says its GoMoorhead! wireless network, launching today, is already reshaping the marketplace.

BYLINE: BY LESLIE BROOKS SUZUKAMO; Pioneer Press

BODY:
The city of Moorhead says hi to Wi-Fi today, becoming the latest player to shake up the telecommunications world by making Internet access a municipal utility like water or electricity.

Located 240 miles northwest of the Twin Cities across from Fargo, N.D., Moorhead will unveil a new municipally owned, citywide wireless Internet system called GoMoorhead! for its 35,000 residents, and it is already reshaping the marketplace, municipal officials said Tuesday.

The city plans to charge $20 a month for high-speed Internet access. After it announced its plans, prices of cable and DSL in the city dropped from highs of $40 to $60 a month to under $30.

"We're on the cutting edge in a very competitive market," City Manager Bruce Messelt said.

Only two other cities in Minnesota -- Chaska and Buffalo -- offer municipal wireless Internet access. The competitive reaction to Moorhead's project demonstrates the appeal among cities large and small for finding a way around telephone and cable monopolies using a technology called wireless fidelity, better known as Wi-Fi.

On Tuesday, EarthLink, the fourth-largest Internet service provider, won a contract to build and maintain a citywide Wi-Fi network in Philadelphia. Google, the Internet search giant, last week said it would bid to provide free wireless broadband to the city of San Francisco.

Wi-Fi transmits and receives Internet data over the air like radio. Its range is very short -- less than 300 feet -- but Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Tropos Networks developed a way to create a "meshed network" of transmitters mounted on streetlights and traffic signals to blanket a city.

Moorhead used Tropos' equipment, and EarthLink will use its transmitters in Philadelphia.

The city of Minneapolis has a request for proposals for a citywide wireless system. Qwest Communications International and Time-Warner, the city's incumbent telephone and cable companies, have expressed interest in the project; EarthLink has submitted a proposal, too.

"We're targeting other large cities as well," said Cole Reinward, EarthLink's director of Next Generation Broadband. Those cities include Anaheim, Long Beach and San Francisco in California.

St. Paul officials are studying whether they want their city to follow Minneapolis and lay down its own Wi-Fi cloud.

The $2 million Moorhead project will be owned by the city and run out of its Public Services, which handles city water and power, said GoMoorhead! general manager Bill Schwandt. Moorhead and Fargo once were blanketed by a privately owned Wi-Fi network but service was suspended last year when the company, Kirkland-Wash.-based Monet Mobile Networks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Private companies will run a help desk and monitor the system but the city will own the network, which covers 13 square miles, including the campus of Minnesota State University in Moorhead, Schwandt said.

The city expects 4,000 of its 13,000 to sign up, particularly in high growth areas of the city where residents have grumbled about not getting access to broadband Internet, Messelt said.

About 2,500 households pre-registered in August for the service, and about 1,100 are already using it, Schwandt said.

Moorhead consulted closely with the city of Chaska, which uses Tropos equipment for its system. In Chaska, 2,300 households out of the city's 7,500, or 30 percent, use its Wi-Fi system called Chaska.net, said Brad Mayer, the city's information systems manager.

Anecdotally, it appears most users of Chaska's network are former dial-up subscribers who wouldn't or couldn't pay the $40 to $50 monthly fees for DSL or cable in the Twin Cities metro area as opposed to people who switched from conventional broadband. "I think it's gotten more people on a high-speed connection," City Manager Dave Porkorney said.