MobilePro, a leading broadband wireless services company, that won a competitive bid for Sacramento’s city-wide wireless cloud, announced today it has elected to withdraw from the project.
After being declared the RFP winner and going through a lengthy permitting process, the City of Sacramento forwarded MobilePro a counter proposal requiring that the company establish a free high-speed wireless network supported almost exclusively by advertising revenue without the benefit of the city serving as an anchor tenant.
Based on the company’s successful Tempe, Ariz. model, MobilePro’s original proposal provided for limited area, limited bandwidth, no-cost service but required higher bandwidth broadband users to pay a monthly fee. MobilePro also offered an alternative designed to close the “digital divide” to the city’s low-income quintile of residents, which included the city serving as an anchor tenant, but this proposal was likewise rejected by the city.
Last year MobilePro that provided outdoor public Wi-Fi Internet access and real-time video applications in Sacramento’s Cesar Chavez Plaza Park.
MobilePro President and Chief Operating Officer Jerry Sullivan said:
“It is our understanding based on the final request of the City of Sacramento that the city would require MobilePro to provide free high-speed wireless Internet service to all residents and have the company rely primarily on advertising revenues for its profits and returns on investment.
Based upon MobilePro’s research and experience as one of the leading Wi-Fi broadband wireless network service providers to municipalities in North America, MobilePro does not believe that an advertising-supported business case is financially sustainable. At this time, we view such a restrictive economic model as incompatible with our original long-term plans for both the residents of Sacramento as well as the MobilePro stockholders.”
Sullivan added, “We appreciate the opportunity to work with the City of Sacramento and wish the city the best of luck moving forward with this project in a manner that fits its needs.
MobilePro will continue to actively pursue its access-based revenue business model with other municipalities throughout the United States in the future as we have in the past.”
Strix Systems is the preferred vendor of Mobilepro/Neoreach, and provides the network hardware for WazTempe in Arizona (and other cities in that state). Deployment of the Yuma network is scheduled to begin in late 2006.
Recently, MobilePro has been using Cisco gear, including their 4400 Series Wireless LAN Controllers and the Wireless Control System to manage Cisco Aironet¨ 1500 Series Access Points, which are attached to street lights and utility poles.
MobilePro Corp., based in Bethesda, Md., is one of North America’s leading wireless broadband companies. The company serves over 220,000 total customer lines throughout the United States, primarily through its CloseCall America, AFN and Kite subsidiaries.
NOTE: Coincidently WiFiNetNews posted a story nearly simultaneously with the same headline and offers an updater:
I talked to Stephen Ferguson, the city’s CTO and Jim Rinehart, the head of the economic development department for Sacramento, about this development. Both Ferguson and Rinehart said that the evolving nature of metro-scale wireless networks in other cities affected the city council’s requirements for this network.
Because other cities were able to find providers that could meet the city council’s targets, this meant that MobilePro was asked for comparable services. “The council’s feeling was if we’re going to sign a contract with a provider, we want it to be comparable with what we’re seeing in other locations like Portland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia,” Ferguson said.
“We wanted to give MobilePro every opportunity to the city’s issues. They were repsonding in good faith,” Ferguson said. “We just got to the point where they couldn’t close it, they couldn’t make it worth, according to their own internal business model.” The city wanted advertising-supported free access to be a part of the mix, they said.
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