Look Front Range, no wires

If all goes according to plan, residents, businesses, institutions and visitors in 10 Front Range communities will have Wi-Fi access anywhere in those cities by mid-2008.

In September, a partnership of 10 Colorado communities – Arvada, Boulder, Broomfield, Golden, Lakewood, Louisville, Northglenn, Superior, Thornton and Wheat Ridge – formed Colorado Wireless Communities, a group committed to providing broadband wireless technology in the Front Range.

A request for proposals should be released early next year, with vendor selection later in the spring, said Chris Puccio, director of information technology for the city of Boulder.

Like many other citywide Wi-Fi projects, Colorado Wireless Communities, which Puccio refers to as CWC, will partner with an experienced Internet provider to build and manage the network.

EarthLink, for example, is building and will manage the municipal wireless networks in Philadelphia, Anaheim and Milpitas, Calif. San Francisco is still negotiating with EarthLink for its network.

The process to get to bid is taking longer than Puccio would have liked because he is working with nine other communities. In April, when Puccio initially proposed a Boulder-only Wi-Fi network to city council, he thought the process would be well under way by now.

But although it’s taking longer to organize, the regional approach makes more business sense to a potential partner, Puccio said. The combined cities include 620,000 residents in 197 square miles.

Only the cities, not the unincorporated county areas between them, will be a part of the network. And the CWC could always expand.

“We have interest from Denver, Aurora, Westminster,” Puccio said. “The 10 cities – this is what we’re going out to bid with. Once we build this area, we’ll be in close partnership with (the Internet service provider partner), and then we can expand. A few years down the road I’d like to see this blanket the entire Denver metro area.”

The CWC hired Civitium LLC, an Alpharetta, Ga.-based consulting firm for municipal governments and institutions that are considering similar networks, to conduct feasibility studies and help write the request for proposal, conduct the selection process and decide on a single provider.

Back in April Boulder, city council approved Puccio’s request to spend $24,000 on initial feasibility studies conducted by Civitium. Since then all 10 CWC cities have pitched in $13,800 a piece to pay for the rest of Civitium’s work.

Installing such a network costs about $150,000 per square mile, according to research done by New York-based JupiterResearch. The cost for the 197-square-mile CWC area would be roughly $29.5 million. Yearly costs are estimated to be about one-third of that investment – about $9.8 million in the region – to support the network including marketing, help desk, customer service, technical support and maintenance, Puccio said.

It is too early to estimate how much the service will cost users, Puccio said.

In October, Muniwireless.com, a Web site that tracks the municipal wireless industry, predicted that more than $3 billion will be spent over the next four years to build and operate public wireless networks for U.S. municipalities.

Contact Caron Schwartz Ellis at 303-440-4950 or csellis@bcbr.com.

On the Web>
www.coloradowirelesscommunities.com.

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