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Houston council considers Earthlink wifi contract
By Larry Hendrick | April 4, 2007
Today, the City of Houston considers the $2.5 million dollar payment to Earthlink for access to the proposed Muni WiFi network. Since the City Council approved the original idea, there is no reason to believe they won’t approve the money.
Yesterday, the Houston Chronicle had an article about this meeting and the quote I featured below has special significance.
Houston council considers Earthlink wifi contract | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
City officials had initially hoped network access would be free for city government. But once discussions were under way, it became clear that wasn’t feasible, Lewis said.
“What we came to understand was that the players in this field really need the city government to be an anchor tenant for network use,” he said. “That way they can finance the project.”
This is significant because last May, Mayor Bill White and Richard Lewis held a teleconference (download mp3 here) for local bloggers, working to rally support for their idea.
Here is a transcript of a question I asked Richard Lewis, at the 32 minute mark of the audio, and his response.
Larry: In several of the article that have been in the Houston Chronicle it states the City was wanting the person who was awarded this contract to provide those services at no charge to the city. It seems to me, that takes out the largest player that would help this actually be a break-even proposition.
Richard: I don’t think I agree with that because what we’re offering is the use of our property, primarily the electric franchise lightpoles, at either a very low cost or potentially no cost. And in consideration for that, we believe the city government can free up tax dollars by the use of this network at a very low cost or potentially no cost and I think the market is going to respond to that.
As you can see, the city was naive about this whole project. I think I should have been called in as a consultant for this project and paid a lot of money for my expertise, but I wasn’t and now the City of Houston is writing a check to Earthlink to the tune of $2.5 million.
Here are a few supporting articles on Business Unusual
Muni Wifi … A Fairy Tale
Digital Houston, The Fairy Tale Continues
The Newest Muni-WiFi News
Topics: WiFi |
August 29th, 2007 at 2:42 pm
And now EarthLink writes the city a check for $5m: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5092403.html.
August 29th, 2007 at 3:05 pm
Glenn, yesterday I started an article predicting the City of Houston would be $5mil richer. I finished it early this morning and began the upload and discovered my server was down … for five hours.
It looks like the one thing I predicted incorrectly was that Earthlink would take the opportunity to bail-out of the contract.
That is now the top article at Business Unusual.