Never Send A City To Do A Company’s Job
By Mitch Berg
St. Louis Park’s “groundbreaking” municipal wi-fi is no-fi:
The City Council will vote Monday on whether to find Arinc — the Wi-Fi system’s Maryland-based contractor — in default of its contract, in part because the project is months behind schedule.
Last spring, the city told residents to expect service by June.
This summer, it told them to expect service by fall.
This fall, it said to expect service by Nov. 30.
Now, the city isn’t even guessing.
Because it is considering legal action against Arinc, “the city is no longer able to provide a current project or service availability schedule,” the city’s website reads.
The city is “very seriously” considering suing Arinc, said spokesman Jamie Zwilling.
Of course, cities throughout the metro have drunk the “digital divide” koolaid; some have added the “green” chaser. Minneapolis is working on its own wi-fi system; Saint Paul has been fighting (and, given that it’s not selected a contractor, I’d say winning) the wi-fi battle for months.
The council held a closed-door meeting Dec. 3 to discuss the possibility of a lawsuit and what effect it might have on the project’s completion.
I’m guessing “totally scupper”, but what do I know. I’m just an IT geek. Not a city bureaucrat/”visionary”.
December 17th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I love visionaries. They pay the bills for all those crazy IT projects out there that suck up the nutty “visionary” coders and engineers. It sucks trying to beat one of those guys into reality when you’ve got to deliver real products in volume and on time.
Of course, it helps to be clueless as well as visionary. Anybody who really knew anything about WiFi would have run from the project as they began to see that it’s really not set up to handle seriously large scale nets. WiMax has the infrastructure behind it to be a contender, but it’s got its own set of debacles going on now that’ll delay it.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Yeah, I’m really glad that we have Haliburton, or say Rockwell International or Martin Marietta to program our ATAC system.. I mean, that wasn’t billions and billions over budget, certainly wasn’t years and years late.. or well, of course, it was.
Nerd – Concordia did precisely this for a student population of a few thousand, all of which are provided (paid for as part of their fee structure) wireless notebooks.. so I think it can in fact be done.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
Peev-
The issue isn’t whether it can be done (a city is a little bigger challenge than a college campus by the way) but whether it needs to be done. There are already at least two (probably more) ways to get high speed internet access in SLP. I for one would rather not depend on the robustness of a government-run solar-powered internet connection no matter how “inexpensive” it is purported to be.
December 17th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
What? You’re telling me defense contracts go overtime and over budget? Who’da thunk it!
Concordia did precisely this for a student population of a few thousand, all of which are provided (paid for as part of their fee structure) wireless notebooks.. so I think it can in fact be done.
Concordia is a very compact campus. It is a set of very closely-spaced buildings – quite easy to wire for wi-fi. The technology, and the engineering and project-management challenges are, to say the least, orders of magnitude different.
Students also pay (last I checked) $22,350/year to attend Cord, so there’s an impetus for the school to get it right that just doesn’t exist for muni wi-fi services.