[RTC List] Tempe AZ deploys WiFi citywide

[CrawfordCA at aol.com]

Thought you'd find this of interest. For those of you who do, you may want  
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Chris Crawford
_www.justiceserved.com_ (http://www.justiceserved.com) 
 
_www.humboldtbiz.org_ (http://www.humboldtbiz.org) 
 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Direct link:
_http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.php?id=102623&utm_source=dc_0
61205&utm_medium=enews&utm_content=story_ 
(http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.php?id=102623&utm_source=dc_061205&utm_medium=enews&utm_content=s
tory) 
Tempe, Arizona:  First U.S. Citywide Public Access Wi-Fi 
 
Government Technology  Magazine

 
Digital Communities

 
Blake Harris, 
Dec 01,  2006

The city of Tempe boasts the largest ubiquitous  border-to-border high-speed 
broadband network in North America (40 square miles)  that provides Wi-Fi 
access to residents and the business community as well as to  its municipal 
workforce. 

The network, dubbed WAZ Tempe, is the result of  an initiative that 
unofficially began three years ago when Deputy CIO David Heck  and others approached 
Tempe City Council and raised the possibility of providing  wireless Internet 
service in the city's downtown area as a economic development  stimulus and a 
means to give greater access to Arizona State University (ASU)  resources.

"We looked at several different models as to how we could  bring that into 
our community," explained Heck. "One was that the city could  actually deploy 
the network, but we felt that was a little cost prohibitive. And  as well, the 
city didn't really want to take on the maintenance and customer  service 
headaches that this would bring."

So instead they decided to  leverage the assets the city had -- primarily its 
street light poles on every  street in the city to mount antennas -- to 
entice a company to deploy and  provide Wi-Fi service for a fee to residents that 
would be in competition with  other local cable and DSL broadband providers.

The city first issued a  Request for Information, followed with a formal RFP. 
The result was that the  city received several bids and on April 21, 2005 
Tempe City Council voted to  award a 5-year contract for city-wide wireless 
broadband services to MobilePro  Corporation out of Bethesda, MD. MobilePro 
partnered with StrixSystems and  Pronto Networks to build and support the wireless 
network.

The company  began deployment in September 2005, and opened the network for 
service in March  2006. Since it's completion, the neighboring cities of 
Chandler, AZ and Gilbert,  AZ have also signed agreements with MobilePro to deploy a 
wireless network in  their communities. Upon completion of these cities, 
expected in 2007, the WAZ  wireless network will have a 187 square mile footprint.

Win-Win  Contract Terms
In securing the deal, Tempe brought to the table not only  free use of the 
city street light infrastructure, but also their existing fiber  backhaul 
locations for Mobile Pro to deploy its network. In return, the city  negotiated a 
number of free benefits to serve citizens better.

"One of  these was that we would have about a 2 square mile zone in our 
downtown area  where people would have free unlimited access for two hours," 
explained Heck.  "And then after that 2 hour period, if someone wants to continue, 
they can pay  by the hour. We also asked that tempe.gov and ASU domains and all 
sub-domains  below them would be free access from anywhere in the network. So 
citizens  wouldn't have to subscribe to get services from tempe.gov or  
asu.edu."

Free access to city web sites was seen as the catalyst to  jump-start 
e-government for Tempe as well as a way to streamline city  services.

Additionally, the agreement with MobilePro allowed for the  creation of a 
municipal network deployed on the same infrastructure as the  public network. 
This second, "virtual" network was to be used by municipal  workers -- police, 
fire, water, traffic and development services personnel -- to  enhance their 
ability to provide services in the community. So every police  officer, patrol 
car and fire truck on the street equipped with a laptop computer  that is Wi-Fi 
enabled would have access to information that has never before  been available 
in the field due to limited bandwidth. 

"We are using the  Wi-Fi network in our police cars to access email and 
upload and download  reports, for example," explained Heck. "Basically, it is an 
extension of our  local network here, so anything they can do, any applications 
they can run when  they are in the building, the can now do in the field. 

"This really  opens up a lot of things for a municipal employee in terms of 
not having to come  back to the office to get at resources. So we have code 
enforcement workers and  we have water and utility workers and our traffic 
engineers who are out in the  field who can now access their resources. And we use a 
VPN so we basically  tunnel into our internal network for security reasons. 
But once they are in,  they have access to all the resources they would have 
from their  office."

Optimization and Pilots
The basic network work was up  by the end of March, according to Heck. 
However, from March until August,  MobilePro actually doubled the number of access 
points in the city due to  coverage issues. "Because this was one of the first 
networks deployed of this  size, the company under-estimated the number of 
access points they would need,"  Heck said. "We found in the beginning there were 
just too many gaps in the  network and so we elected to wait until they were 
finished optimizing it before  we started using it for municipal purposes. We 
didn't really even start piloting  the network until about September this 
year. So we haven't been at this very  long. We are in that phase right now and we 
are starting to get some feedback.  And the folks that are using it out there 
are very pleased with it."

So  far, the municipality has simply extended access to existing applications 
into  the field. However, while they only current have static video from a 
couple of  cameras, they do have one fire vehicle with a camera mounted on a 
mast. "We have  used that to roll up on scene. They pull up the mast and the 
captains and chiefs  can view the video from their desk in their offices or in 
their emergency  operations center," Heck explained.

The municipal network negotiated in  the lease agreement with MobilePro is 
also to provide a future backbone for  communication devices that utilize 
frequencies set aside by the Office of  Homeland Security (4.9 GHz), providing a 
migration path for dedicated public  safety communication.

So the city has an eye on possibly deploying other  public safety 
applications in the future. But as it exists now, the network is  robust enough to allow 
access to multiple Internet service providers should this  prove desirable in 
the future as well as to support telephone service via  Voice-over-IP.
 
_Blake  Harris _ (mailto:bharris at govtech.net&subject=RE: Tempe, Arizona: 
First U.S. Citywide Public Access Wi-Fi  article) 
Editor, Government Technology Magazine - Digital  Communities
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