St. Louis Park City’s Solar WiFi in Minnesota has come under fire by residents. Too damn ugly.
The city is installing some 400, 16-foot poles equipped with solar panels and mesh radio nodes around the city. Solar eliminates the need for any wiring.
Now the city is re-considering the tall, dedicated 16 foot poles. They may attach the radios and their accompanying solar panels on existing infrastructure, possibly co-locating them at stop signs.
Why not put WiFi radios on existing utility poles that also supply reliable AC power?
The local power company, which owns the poles, would charge between $10 to $20 per pole per month — a cost the city hadn’t planned for in its $3.3 million initial investment.
St. Louis Park (pop: 45,000), covering 10-sq miles, entered a public-private partnership with ARINC of Maryland, to install, run and maintain the system’s infrastructure, with an initial investment of $3.3 million from the city. St. Louis Park also negotiated with Internet provider Unplugged Cities of Fridley to operate it.
Yesterday, at Unwire Oregon, CEO of MetroFi, Chuck Haas, told me (Sam Churchill), that Portland’s WiFi network expansion is often dependent on the pole owners; Pacific Power and PGE in Portland.
Apparently it was the cost of power, not the pole attachment fee, that was in MetroFi’s contract with the city.
Now, according to Haas, negotiations with power pole owner Pacific Power, is going slower than expected, and slowing the expansion into North Portland.
In downtown Portland it’s a different story; power is underground and MetroFi’s Skypilot canisters are generally placed on city-owned traffic lights.
PGE wants to abolish a 2005 law that requires utilities to match the taxes that they collect from customers with what they actually pay the government.
LED street lights from a variety of companies including BetaLED, Cree, IntencityLighting, Led Lightgroup and Lumecon are on display at Lightfair International.
DailyWireless has more solar stories.
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