Asheville's Wireless Network

Good piece in GovTech about the City of Asheville's $20K wireless alternative to shelling out $450K/year for fiber.

An important side note: part of the reason Asheville's fiber bill got to be a big problem is because the structure of local franchising fees was tossed by the NC State Legislature via the Video Service Competition Act of 2006: Asheville, N.C., saved millions of dollars and also supported a local business last fall when the city’s IT department opted to build a city-owned wireless network to connect public safety buildings.

Asheville was using a fiber network as a condition of a cable franchise to connect 22 administrative buildings, fire stations and police substations, but the North Carolina Video Service Competition Act of 2006 gave the cable TV providers the power to negotiate statewide contacts, taking local government out of the plan. The new annual price for the city’s fiber service was $450,000.
This put the city in a tough spot, said Jonathan Feldman, Asheville’s IT services director. Asheville’s station alerting, which was previously connected by fiber, had resulted in a threefold improvement in cardiac emergency survival rates and a 20 percent improvement in structure fire response rates.
The city didn’t want to pay the new hefty fee for service, Feldman said, but the new system was saving lives and the city couldn’t give it up. That’s when the city found a $20,000 solution to a million dollar problem.

Battles of the Bands

I heard about this problem a couple months ago. Today's WaPo has a good summary. It seems that a wireless broadband network presently under development may cripple aviation GPS (and many consumer receivers as well):

Two of 21st-century America’s favorite gadgets — the smartphone and the GPS device — are on a collision course, according to a report delivered Friday to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The report says deployment of a massive new network of towers and satellites to expand wireless communication may effectively shut down Global Positioning System devices that are at the core of a multibillion-dollar plan to revolutionize aviation. They also may affect some GPS units used by drivers, bicyclists and boaters.

Whoops.