Free Wi-Fi in Orlando is coming around again. Sort of.
Orlando experimented with free Wi-Fi in early 2004 in one square mile of its downtown business district. But barely anyone used it. A city official said the network averaged about 44 users per day until June of 2005, when the city shut it off.
Orlando never officially studied what went wrong, perhaps because the answer was obvious.
“There were several factors that impacted our Wi-Fi project,” said Conrad Cross, chief information officer for the city of Orlando. “It was very early in the game, so not a lot of people had Wi-Fi devices. And we offered the free Wi-Fi in an area that just doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic. People don’t tend to sit in our parks because it’s so hot and humid most of the time. People tend to stay inside, and most of the people downtown already have Internet access of some kind when they are indoors.”
Cross said the free Wi-Fi project cost the city about $1,800 per month.
Now, after several months of perusing proposals, Orlando officials are on the verge of announcing which of three vendors will continue on with the city’s Wi-Fi odyssey.
Free Wi-Fi is just one piece of the city’s project. The other parts involve exclusive rights to provide “communications, video and broadband services” to planned construction projects in the city, including several high-rise commercial and residential buildings with a total of about 1,650 units. During the next 10 years, the city expects about 40 high-rise buildings to be built-and Orlando wants a cut of future broadband revenues.
“These services will include, but are not limited to, multi-channel video programming (including cable, satellite, and/or Internet Protocol-video), telecommunications (including telephone and Voice over Internet Protocol), high-speed Internet access, data transfer, digital commerce, on-demand content, other broadband-enabled capacities and wireless communications,” according to Orlando’s City Council.
Three companies have been front-runners to provide the capabilities: Smart City, Proximiti Communications Inc. and Bright House Networks Inc. Each has proposed a combination of free Wi-Fi Internet access along with revenue sharing from broadband services.
Proximiti’s proposal focused on offering free low-speed Wi-Fi Internet access, along with subsidies to help the city’s have-nots get their hands on computers. The VoIP and mobile solutions provider told the city it would make enough revenue from paid high-speed Wi-Fi access and the high-rise rights to offset the costs of helping bridge the digital divide, Cross said.
Smart City, a national communications provider, proposed to provide Orlando with a monthly fee equal to 5 percent of the project’s monthly net revenue. The vendor proposed free high-speed access in certain areas, along with a revenue-sharing component based on advertising on a free Wi-Fi page, Cross said.
Bright House Networks is a cable company with predominant market share in central Florida, including Tampa Bay and Orlando. Of the company’s proposal, Cross said that Bright House’s plan didn’t provide the city with the revenue percentages proposed by the other two companies.
In contrast to Orlando’s plans for profiting from public Wi-Fi access, St. Cloud, a suburb located 28 miles south of Orlando, recently launched free citywide Wi-Fi access for its 28,000 residents, businesses and visitors.
Hewlett-Packard Co. won a contract with St. Cloud in August and promptly began blanketing St. Cloud’s 15 square miles with Wi-Fi equipment from Tropos Networks Inc. and Aptilo Networks A.B. HP said the deal also includes its iPAQ Pocket PC, ProLiant servers, consulting and integration services, financial and support services, and the HP OpenView management software platform. Plans call for city workers to use the network.
Back in Orlando, Cross says Orlando’s plans do not include a municipal network for city government use and there are no plans to do so.
Interestingly, the Orlando metropolitan area is home to a plethora of high-tech firms that make up the area’s Space Coast. Cross explained that tourism plays second fiddle to technology in terms of tax dollars brought into the area. Free Wi-Fi likely will continue popping up in suburban Orlando, but Walt Disney Co. officials said there are no such plans for free Wi-Fi access in its parks and stressed that guests have access to the Internet via Wi-Fi-they just have to pay for it.
Around the country, negotiations are brewing for Wi-Fi contracts in Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, Minneapolis and others places. Last week, The Washington Post reported that Washington D.C. city officials are shopping for a Wi-Fi provider to bring free Internet access to low-income residents. The district reportedly plans to contract with the vendor that pitches the most comprehensive free Internet access plan, possibly including computers and training.
And the citywide trend is expanding to counties, even entire states. In Europe, Macedonia is reportedly being blanketed with Wi-Fi access.
No matter the scale of the deployments or whether Wi-Fi access is free, the Wi-Fi phenomenon is expected to spell good times for equipment vendors.
