Sustaining the Municipal Wireless Network

While the overwhelming majority of today's discussion about municipal wireless networks focuses on the technical aspects, also critical is working out the business models that detail how these networks will financially justify their existence. Whether we continually support these networks using public funds - thereby making them susceptible to political whims - or we turn over network operations to an outside entity, planners must invest a serious amount of thought into the financial aspects of these projects.

One relatively short article cannot address every aspect of these issues, but it can at least highlight the crucial fundamentals.

One point that must be stressed is that your network's hard design specifications will dictate the revenue streams and services your network will achieve. If you build a network that has relatively low throughput and isn't 100 percent reliable, you'll see a direct correlation in the adoption rate, usefulness and return on investment.

Regardless of legal structure - public ownership, public-private partnership, private ownership, nonprofit or any other variations - there are two major financial categories that must be scrutinized. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll define these categories as Government Cost Redirection and Revenue-Generating Services/Applications.

Government Cost Redirection
It's impossible to measure the potential savings without first fully documenting current costs, which creates a "chicken and egg" scenario. Not knowing what services and applications the municipal network will replace makes it impossible to predict on what services to collect the financial data to make a valid comparison.

Based on my experience, however, the best way to attack this question is to collect all the data, then determine what's applicable. Though it would be impossible to outline every line item in this article, a few obvious expenses immediately come to mind. How many telephone lines does your municipality have, and at what cost per line? How many Internet connections does your municipality pay for to connect your facilities? How about mobile data connections (evolution-data optimized) in your first responders' vehicles? Do you use metropolitan LAN connections to connect your facilities? If not, do you own fiber that connects your facilities? And if you do, are there any maintenance costs associated with those connections?

As time consuming and expensive as this process can be, a complete and thorough telecommunications audit must be done. Telephone lines are already mentioned, but how about the related cost of your leased private branch exchange (PBX) systems? Since you probably use traditional telephone service, chances are you also use an expensive and probably obsolete PBX system.

In one real-world example, the CIO of a large, East Coast city needed to replace a few phones and called his telecommunications maintenance vendor. He was informed that the PBX system the city was paying to maintain had long since reached the end of its usable life, and the service company no longer had any replacement units to swap out his dead phones. This led the CIO to cancel the expensive contract, since it was now painfully obvious the city was paying for a service the vendor couldn't actually provide. Even if your 1980s vintage AT&T Merlin system can still be serviced, many new and valuable features are unavailable to you.

As incredible as that story might sound, at least the municipality was getting continued value from these obsolete telephones. In many cities, telecommunications networks have acquired lives of their own. Just bringing a dial tone to each line (without looking at the PBX lease/maintenance fees), probably costs $17 to $55 a month, before adding any additional services to the equation. There are also documented instances of money being paid for lines that aren't used. In Macon, Ga., after a thorough telecommunications audit, city officials determined unused telephone lines cost the city roughly $5,700 per month (nearly $69,000 a year, or roughly 10