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Milwaukee Enters Race to Become First Major Wi-Fi City in U.S.

Yesterday, Oct.12, 2005, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, WI, announced a $20 million-plus initiative to create a citywide Wi-Fi network, one that would be built at no cost to the city or taxpayers. It is a move that he and other city officials believe positions Milwaukee to become the first fully wireless large city in America.

Yesterday, Oct.12, 2005, Mayor Tom Barrett of Milwaukee, WI, announced a $20 million-plus initiative to create a citywide Wi-Fi network, one that would be built at no cost to the city or taxpayers. It is a move that he and other city officials believe positions Milwaukee to become the first fully wireless large city in America.

"This initiative constitutes a multi-million dollar private investment and I am committed to make the Milwaukee Wireless Initiative a reality," said Barrett in a prepared statement. "It will create tremendous growth for a locally-owned company and will open the door to new jobs, job training and other social and educational opportunities."

According to Paul Vornholt, a spokesman for the mayor's office, the city still has to complete negotiations and come to a final agreement with Midwest Fiber Network, the private company that approached the city with an offer to build the network. Because the company already has extensive fiber running through Milwaukee, city officials hope that it might only be a matter of months before portions of the Wi-Fi network are up and running. "That is why we feel confident that we can be first, beating Philadelphia and San Francisco," Vornholt said.

Midwest Fiber Network is a 4-year-old Milwaukee-based firm that company co-founder Donna Raffaelli described as a licensed telecommunications utility. "We build, own, maintain and lease fiber optic infrastructure, largely to businesses," she said. "As such, we have a significant amount of fiber infrastructure that already exists here in the city. That really speeds up the process of implementing and deploying a Wi-Fi network like this."

City officials are already well acquainted with Midwest Fiber Network because the company leases city conduits -- pipes that run under the streets -- to run some of their fiber. "Because we have an existing relationship with the city, we typically approach them for planning purposes any time we are considering a new project," Raffaelli added. "In this case, we were fairly surprised at how fast the mayor's office jumped on this and really showed support. That has just been fantastic. It really creates the drive to get this thing wrapped up quickly."

Before the deal is finalized, however, the details of the arrangements with the city still need to be ironed out -- such things as permitting, access to conduit and city facilities for wireless equipment -- in what the city calls a facilities license and use agreement. And the final arrangements will then require the approval of Milwaukee's City Council. As well, negotiations with several other partners will have to be finalized. "This is truly a large and extensive project that requires a lot of participation," said Raffaelli.

Open Access Network
Both the company and city officials are quick to emphasize that the network is to be open access, meaning that anyone who wants to buy bandwidth from Midwest Fiber can do so to resell it through subscriptions to residents. Midwest Fiber will not itself act as an ISP, but rather will only wholesale the bandwidth to other partners.

"It will not be a proprietary network in the sense that the current telco networks are," explained Randy Gschwind, Milwaukee CIO. "The telcos are managing to pretty much keep their networks closed because they are no longer required to charge unpreferencial rates to competing providers. And the cable companies have never had to share their networks with competing providers. So we are hoping this opens some possibilities for local businesses to get into this market. This absolutely will be an open network on which any large or small company can buy wholesale bandwidth and set up their own ISP service. "

Gschwind points out that state law prohibits Milwaukee from providing Internet services directly. " We are simply responding to an offer from a private company to build a network," he said. "We are not giving anything away and this does not involve the city's existing fiber infrastructure. In negotiations in the coming weeks, we will be looking very carefully at whether we want to charge Midwest Fiber for use of facilities, whether we want payback in terms of free access in the parks or some other appropriate payback for the use of those facilities.

"So the city is very definitely not looking at giving anything away for free. At the same time, we understand there are clearly a lot of intangible benefits from something like this -- local employment, economic development, and so on," he added.

Gschwind notes that one possible payback would be for the city to get some channels or bandwidth for its own use. The city already has an extensive fiber network that connects all its facilities. "We are also looking at putting wireless on that network for public safety, public works and other uses," he said. "So it would be a trade-off whether we would want that on our own network or on a commercial network. But we will certainly look at the possibility of putting this up more quickly via this commercial network."

City officials are suggesting that it may only be a matter of months before the network is up and running. "We are trying to fast track this," said Gschwind. "We would like to beat Philadelphia's 60-day negotiation time for instance with our negotiations. And obviously there is some PR in being the first city to actually implement city-wide Wi-Fi, so we are trying to do this as quickly as possible."

Midwest Fiber is a little more cautious in its timeline. "We already have some things in place in terms of the existing infrastructure," said Raffaelli. "And given that all the contract negotiations and everything go as planned, I think we would be able to get started with the rest of the build-out as early as the first of the year. Several areas should be wrapped up and delivering in 2006. And the rest will likely run into 2007 because this is meant to be a full coverage and it is a fairly large area -- 100 square miles."