The city of Portland has posted a procurement request to authorize spending of up to $405,000 for Clear WiMAX service over two years. Michael Weinberg, President of the Personal Telco Project, has posted the pdf.
City bureaus need mobile high speed wireless Internet access in order to accomplish a variety of tasks including mobile field work relating to building inspections, law enforcement activities, and fire and rescue activities. The City currently has one vendor providing such services, however the City requires additional services that will allow City personnel to conduct certain work functions, including but not limited to, video conferences and other high quality video streaming.
High quality video requires significant capacity (e.g., an MPEG2 video stream can require up to 3.75 Megabits per second of downstream capacity), therefore the City, having examined the alternatives wishes to utilize a high speed wireless Internet access with 4 Megabytes per second of a downstream connection and 384 Kilobytes per second of an upstream connection utilizing a wireless technology called WiMAX that is faster than any other cellular technology.
The City intends to enter into an agreement with Clear Wireless LLC for mobile high speed wireless Internet access. The City requires the Contractor to provide the equipment and maintenance without the use of any subcontractors.
City procurement supervisor Barbara Gibson tells Oregonian writer Mike Rogoway that this request came through the city’s Bureau of Information Technology. Plans call for the city buying a to-be-determined number of WiMAX subscriptions from Clear for $50 a month.
The city’s Logan Kleier, who oversaw the Wi-Fi project with MetroFi and stayed on as a technology bureau staffer, told Rogoway that there’s not much to the procurement, just a faster option to supplement the Verizon EV-DO service the city currently uses.
“There’s nothing to complicated about it, Mike,” he said. “It is what it is.”
Dailywireless has extensive stories on MetroFi and a MuniFi Wrapup.
