AT&T, which last week abandoned a city-wide deployment in St. Louis, is abandoning a city-wide Wi-Fi deployment in Napa, California, this week, reports Muniwireless. Napa and AT&T are ending their partnership after the two inked their deal in February (See: DailyWireless AT&T Unwires Napa, California).
According to The Napa Valley Register, the utility poles were too short to allow antennas to be properly mounted. The California Public Utilities Commission specifies how Wi-Fi antennas should be attached to utility poles, but there was no room to install the antennas after allowing for new safety clearances on high-voltage lines.
“Nothing can be hung on the bottom 16 feet of a utility pole”, said Damon Wei, AT&T’s general manager for Napa. ‘That leaves just 14 feet on a 30-foot pole for up to two levels of electrical lines. The Wi-Fi devices would have intruded into the PUC’s mandated safety zone”, he said.
Then there was the issue was maintaining a continuous flow of electricity to power the antennas 7X24. AT&T is now looking limited deployments of downtown hot-spots in both cities.
The city also planned to offer 10 hours of ad-support service offered to consumers each month. Ad-free subscriptions would have been sold for about $20 per month. After testing the system across a two-square-mile area, Napa planned to use the network to support municipal services. The parallel system will run over a separate 4.9 GHz frequency to enhance communications for city police, fire and public works employees.
Napanet and N-Wi-Fi.com are currently the local DSL, VOIP, Wireless, and IT providers for residents and businesses in the Valley.
In St. Louis, AT&T and city officials spent 18 months negotiating before reaching a deal in February to connect the city’s 62 square miles. Aside from giving access to light poles, there was no cost to the city, though it planned to spend about $400,000 a year to buy access to a special public-service network it would use for police and other city services. The main problem in St. Louis was that AT&T engineers couldn’t find a cheap way to power the network’s hot spots.
Napa (18 square miles) has a population of 72,585, while St. Louis (62 square miles) has a population of 2,801,033. These cities join Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and others who have dropped their WiFi plans due to higher costs, lower projected revenues and technical glitches. Chicago killed off an $18.5 million Internet access system in August citing rising costs, spotty demand and reluctance from Earthlink and AT&T.
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