Although it’s not official (yet), three different sources say Unwire Portland, the organization formed to choose a city-wide WiFi network for the city of Portland, Oregon, has chosen a contractor for a $10 million, 134 square mile wireless network that could serve some 500,000 people.

The wireless “cloud” will serve citizens, municipal workers and more than 1000 wireless parking meters via hotspots mounted on lampposts and rooftops owned by the city. It’s similar to San Francisco’s 54 square mile “cloud”, awarded last week and Philadelphia’s 135 square mile city cloud, awarded last year, both to Earthlink.

And the winner is…MetroFi.

UPDATE: Here’s the Portland news release (pdf), a story in the Oregonian, an online forum discussion, PersonalTelco.net (community WiFi), Portland BizJournal, Reuters, SkyPilot’s press release and MetroFi’s press release:

MetroFi, the leader in designing, building and operating free citywide Wi-Fi networks, announced today it has been selected by the City of Portland, the 28th largest city in the United States, to deliver and operate a citywide Wi-Fi network that will provide free wireless Internet access and substantially improved public services to Portland residents.

The announcement demonstrates Portland’s cutting-edge vision for citywide smart parking meters, universal wireless connectivity and affordable Internet access for its residents. The MetroFi Portland system will be built at no cost to the city, and the City of Portland expects to save millions of dollars in productivity and wireless Internet service fees by using the network.

“We are proud to partner with MetroFi in this effort to blanket the city of Portland with wireless Internet access,” said Portland’s mayor, Tom Potter. “MetroFi has demonstrated its commitment to bridging the digital divide by offering both free and low-cost alternatives for broadband access on an open provider network. Additionally, I look forward to realizing the benefits of wireless technology and have high hopes for Portland’s ability to use it to streamline city services and enhance public safety communications.”

The City of Portland, which spans 134 square miles and has a population of approximately 540,000, will be blanketed by a state-of-the-art Wi-Fi mesh network. Residents and visitors of Portland will have wireless access to 1Mbps Wireless Internet at no cost. Portland’s public works field personnel and first responders will have greatly expanded access to wireless network services to facilitate more responsive data communications.

The City of Portland released this news release (pdf):

“We are proud to partner with MetroFi in this effort to bring ubiquitous wireless Internet access to the city of Portland” said Portland Mayor Tom Potter. “I am eager to see the technology employed to help streamline city services and enhance public safety communications.”

City Commissioner Dan Saltzman also praised the announcement. “This partnership between MetroFi and the City represents a monumental effort to bridge the digital divide. Free wireless Internet access will benefit residents, businesses and the city’s many visitors.”

Don Park, president of PersonalTelco (PersonalTelco discussion), the free community WiFi organization in Portland (and co-founder of DailyWireless) said in an online forum:

While the for-pay wireless arena is not our focus, I think the Personal Telco volunteers who helped to give high visibility to having a no-cost service option deserve a round of thanks.

Details of the proposals were kept under wraps during the proposal process, but the public should be able to see some of the proposals with their own eyes (excluding some financials) soon. Proposals were kept confidential, it was explained, in order to avoid competitors challenging the evaluation process by finding small errors or inconsistancies.

Similar bids in other cities may indicate the direction they propose to go in Portland’s wireless cloud. The two other finalists for the Portland Cloud were:

• Earthlink: Likely proposing similar architecture to their winning Philadelphia bid with Tropos mesh gear and Motorola’s Canopy for backhaul.
• VeriLAN: Built metropolitan wireless installations in Portland in 2003 using “pre-WiMax” and Vivato gear. Their proposal uses Cisco’s dual radio mesh gear.

MetroFi, is likely to offer two tiers; a “free” tier (with integrated advertising) and a pay tier for $19.95/month (without ads). MetroFi is dropping fees for wireless Internet access in Cupertino, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale, California. Now everything is free.

Presumably, that would require something close to $10/mo in banner ad revenue per person, per month to break even. That might equate to 20 clickthoughs/mo (@$.50 each), perhaps targeted to the neighborhood. If 100,000 people subscribed to the “free” service that would mean that MetroFi would need something close to $1 million a month in ad revenue to break even. The ad-driven business model has yet to be proven.

Here’s how DailyWireless looks using MetroFi in Sunnyvale. Fractals of Change explains MetroFi’s ad banner technique. Synaptx, located in Mountain View, works with MetroFi on the advertising technology. The City of Alexandria launched Wireless Alexandria last year (See DW: Constant Gardener). They provide free internet access subsidized via ads.

The promotional demo (left) describes the Public Wi-Fi Project, a collaboration between communities and merchants, which uses a proprietary Internet Gateway developed by the Public Wi-Fi Project and utilized by MetroFi. A routing system at the IP level, similar to a captive portal technology, “captures” every page. The PublicWiFiProject was originally developed by Jim Carrillo (888) 755-8537 ext 706. Synaptx started as a division of Virginia-based Logistics Modeling Center, Inc. (LMCI), his company, and later spun off. Synaptx is working with companies like MetroFi for delivering “free” city-cloud services. Pat Uribes (757) 722-1271 has more info on Synaptx.

The Public Wi-Fi Project has a more entrepreneur vision of location-based advertising that’s focused more on small business like coffee shops, not city-wide projects that use public infrastructure. It also doesn’t require the detail of personal information (ie email) that Synaptx requires, said Jim Carrillo. He is skeptical of public/private partnerships that utilize city-owned infrastructure because it takes away the level playing field. Carillo told DailyWireless that if third party ISPs try to compete against these public/private WiFi networks, “the margin just isn’t there.”

Search Engine Marketing Professionals say Pay Per Click ad revenue nearly doubled to $5.75 billion in 2005. Search Engine advertising is profitable, but location-based advertising might drive it home. Cell phones can already be tracked to the nearest cell tower or within 100 feet via GPS. Ekahau’s Wi-Fi tags enable real-time people and asset tracking in any standard Wi-Fi network. Ekahau is one of MetroFi’s technology partners although concerns about user tracking have been expressed.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, told Charlie Rose (Google Video) that the world advertising market is between $500-$700 billion, with half of that in the United States (12min). Internet advertising is 1-2% of that and growing fast. Google has a market cap around $100 billion and made over $6 billion in 2005. It’s expected to make $9 billion this year.

MetroFi uses SkyPilot mesh gear (right), and offered two choices in California; a $19.95/month, 1 Mbps wireless access service (without advertising), or a free 1 Mbps wireless access service (with a half-inch advertising strip at the top of their Web browser).

MetroFi submitted Portland’s proposal before their “all free” move in California, however, so a two tier approach might be expected.

SkyPilot is working with the Fujitsu WiMax chip to provide WiMAX mesh networking infrastructure solutions for the 2.3-2.7 GHz, 3.3-3.8 GHz, and 5.x GHz frequency bands, although availability of those products is not clear. The SkyPilot product line is said to provide dual interoperability for standard Wi-Fi and WiMAX clients and will maintain SkyPilot’s heritage of RF management through interference mitigation and spectral reuse.

The Fujitsu MB87M3400 uses an OFDM 256 PHY that supports channels from 1.75 MHz up to 20 MHz, and can operate in TDD or FDD modes, with support for all available channel bandwidths.

The SkyExtender TriBand integrates SkyPilot’s 5 GHz sychronous mesh backhaul with two high power access pints, one to licensed 4.9 GHz public safety and one dedicated to 2.4 Ghz public WiFi access.

SkyPilot’s SkyExtender TriBand and In Motion Technology have recently also announced a 4.9 GHz mesh networking solution that also works with with cellular data networks like EV-DO.

Using In Motion’s Mobile Gateway 1000 (left) in their trunk, first responders might switch between the licensed 4.9 GHz spectrum (when available) and fallback to cellular when out of range. Availability of the newly announced SkyPilot 4.9GHz product and possible use in Portland is unknown. Skypilot, with big wins in California and Portland, is ramping up production.

SkyPilot gear is being used by MetroFi for Wi-Fi service throughout Cupertino, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. Also working with MetroFi is Aurora, Illinois (pop. 170,000), which plans a 42 square mile network. MetroFi uses a mix of SkyGateway (basestations) and dual-band SkyExtender (mesh nodes), which integrate a 2.4 GHz public access Wi-Fi hotspot and/or a 4.9 GHz public service hotspot. Using 5GHz spectrum for mesh interconnections of the pole-mounted hotspots, about 25 nodes per square mile are expected to provide Wi-Fi connectivity to end users.

Light Reading reports MetroFi will use Cisco routers and Ethernet switches in the core network with DragonWave providing the microwave backhaul.

The network will connect with two carrier-neutral points of presence (POPs) in downtown Portland, Level 3 and Cogent.

DragonWave uses unlicensed 24 GHz gear (right) in addition to some 5.8 GHz from Proxim. Jeff Thompson, founder of DragonWave say rain and snow isn’t a problem, “You would start seeing weather effects at 38 GHz but not at 24 GHz.”

The unlicensed portion of the 24 GHz band is designated by the FCC for point-to-point applications only. The FCC has auction rules for licensing of the 24.25-24.45 GHz and 25.05-25.25 GHz (24 GHz) spectrum band. Either the upper or lower side of the 40 MHz channel pairs can be used for the nodal station or the subscriber station.

MetroFi’s CEO Chuck Haas talked about Public-Private Partnerships at a recent Digital Cities Convention:

Last weekend was my ninth anniversary in the residential broadband business. I was cofounder of Covad Communications, which is the sole remaining broadband provider. MetroFI is a designer, builder and operator of metro-fi or city-owned Wi-Fi networks, and many of you took a tour of Cupertino’s network yesterday. We spent the first two years figuring out the network and business model.

The technology does work. We have happy customers. And the business model works, as well, though the public-private partnership, with the public side being the anchor tenant, is the one that will be the most successfully deployed.

There is no industry standard for mesh networking, yet, so interoperability between mesh vendors continues to be problematic. But WiFi clients are standardized. They’ll be around for years.

But any broadband wireless solution — even free — may not be a slam dunk. There are lots of competitors:

• Free competition is available from PersonalTelco and others. Coffee shops like Starbucks already offer an inexpensive $19.95/month package deal with T-Mobile cellular service.
• Cellular companies are rolling out faster wireless. CDMA-based Sprint and Verizon are increasing EVDO speed this year as is GSM-based Cingular. They deliver both voice and data.
• DirecTV is planning a WiMAX system. It will provide 2-way broadband for data and voice.
• Motorola offers wireless broadband gear for cable operators. Their Cable Canopy, part of its MOTOwi4 platform, includes Motorola’s SB5000 DOCSIS 2.0-compatible cable modem and access point for outdoor applications.
• Clearwire is rolling out WiMAX nationwide. Clearwire, with operations currently in 27 markets, owns licensed 2.5 GHz and plans to go mobile.
• Sprint/Nextel has promised national broadband wireless. They haven’t chosen a system yet, but licensed Mobile WiMAX at 2.5 GHz seems likely. The new 1700/2100 band (especially for AT&T and T-Mobile) will provide additional competition.

According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, MetroFi is considerably smaller than EarthLink, with just 20 employees and undisclosed revenue, but the 11-member committee responsible for choosing the Unwire Portland contractor felt that MetroFi had the most experience with running wireless Internet networks, according to Matt Lampe, chief information officer for Portland.

EarthLink, Tropos and Motorola are Alpha Males in metro space, winning dozens of city-wide WiFi contests. Last week, EarthLink won the bid for San Francisco’s Wi-Fi cloud, spanning 54 square miles. Google will be an anchor tenant on the Earthlink network, supplying free, ad-supported service.

EarthLink has recently won similar deals with Milpitas and Anaheim, California, and the big one in Philadelphia. (What do you think of when you say “Philadelphia”?) Philadelphia’s 135-square-mile “cloud” is expected to cost $10 million to $18 million, similar to San Francisco’s 54 square mile “cloud”. San Francisco’s hilly topography makes coverage more expensive. Portland’s list of registered vendors (required to download the RFP) lists the parties that expressed interest in the RFP.

The entire population of Portland and San Francisco has been lifted into the broadband universe this week. A million broadband subscribers — essentially everyone in those two west coast cities — will now join the global community. Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego have been left behind.

According to TeleGeography, the international fibre glut, which produced a nuclear winter, is now gone. “Persistent international bandwidth demand growth has depleted inventories of unsold circuits on many submarine cables and on some segments of terrestrial networks,” said TeleGeography. Still, only 14 percent of the potential capacity on major submarine cables will be lit by the end of 2006, says TeleGeography.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. VeriLAN founder Steven Schroedl told DailyWireless editor Sam Churchill, that he’s, “just glad it’s over.” But, hey, it’s never over ’til it’s over. Who knows what will happen in the coming months.

More details Friday later. DailyWireless is going on vacation for a couple days.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 9:50 am.