Matt Lampe, CTO for the city, and Rashid Ahmed from the Portland Development Council attended the September Monthly Meeting of Portland’s Personal Telco project, writes Michael Weinberg for Portland’s News for Neighbors.
Lampe gave a formal presentation and fielded questions with assistance from Ahmed. Following the formal Q&A, some attendees discussed the project informally with both Ahmed and Lampe.
Lampe explained that the Unwire Portland project originated as an internal effort to reduce city costs. Currently, each of Portland’s “smart” parking meters use a cellular technology to send credit card information in batches for approval.
This scenario is undesirable for a number of reasons, Lampe explained, most notably the cost of $40/month per meter. Lampe also discussed the need to provide data connections to city facilities that are outside of DSL range. There is also a desire to provide data connections to various city employees in the field.
According to Lampe, the city could have built its own wireless network, using a combination of technologies, to serve these needs; however, rather than building a network that was focused only on city needs, they decided to look at a larger project that could provide benefits to a larger demographic.
The footprint for Phase I, as outlined in the RFP, covers an area of about 1600 square blocks that are currently well served by broadband providers. The Unwire Portland committee expects that this area will be covered by mid-2006, 6 months after the project start date.
The RFP is understandably strict about both the services that will be provided to the City of Portland and the price those services will be offered at ($12/month per parking meter, for example), but it sets very few requirements for the service offerings and pricing for other customers. Lampe and Rashid both expressed that they hoped and expected that proposals would go far beyond what is explicitly required.
When asked why they did not require more in the RFP, given these expectations, Lampe explained that because the city was only offering itself as a tenant, they weren’t actually in a position to place other requirements on bidders.
More is available at Portland’s News for Neighbors.
Portland State’s Daily Vanguard has additional coverage:
According to Don Park, president of PTP and a computer science graduate student at Portland State, charging for use of wireless internet would compromise something built in the spirit of the gift economy. It s a basic service that arguably everybody needs, he said, acknowledging the idea that the network should be a customer-owned utility. Under Unwire Portland s plan the system would provide alternative means of accessing the internet for low-income and disadvantaged citizens.
Don Park is also co-founder of DailyWireless. You can hear the entire talk, complete with the Q and A, on the PTP podcast. Tom Higgins records the meetings monthly on MP3s. You can download the audio directly here.
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