Some answers to questions about the Long Island Wi-Fi project

Carol, Esme and Joe on the MuniWireless website have been posting some questions on why e-Path was picked for the Long Island Wi-Fi project.  Rich Dalton of Newsday has written a followup piece.

The history of the electric utility on Long Island is a twisted path of exorbitant rates and political intrigue.  The Powerplants, and the Transmission and Distribution (T&D) network, aka the real property, is owned by a quasi-public entity called LIPA, which was formed to buy out the private utility, Long Island Lighting Company.  This buy out came about when the utility was forced to scrap their plans for a nuke plant in Shoreham.  Richie Kessel, the affable, self-effacing community activist that drove the charge against Shoreham, is the CEO of LIPA.  He has actually managed to put a friendly face on what was a hated utility.  His path from gadfly to ultimate player, has to be book material.

So LIPA owns the property, and the billing relationship with the customers, and the maintenance of the T & D network, including the maintenance and operation of the powerplants was contracted out to Keyspan, which is in the process of being sold to National Grid.  LIPA buys elecricity from Keyspan, and sells it to the customers. Keyspan has strung some fiber on Long Island, and sells that fiber to ISPs and other folks. 

e-Path would be a customer for for the fiber.   LIPA owns the poles, so e-Path has to rent space on the poles.  If e-Path powers it's nodes from photocell connections on the streetlights, then e-Path has to make agreements with the dozens of lighting districts on Long Island.  If it buys the power from LIPA, it has to make power connections at each pole mounted.  All this will be ridiculously expensive, and Keyspan's fiber network is not particularly extensive, especially on the east end of long island.

The ROI for automated meter reading in Long Island has been estimated by LIPA internal folks at 10-15 years, because of the size and density of the region.  In my opinion, there are much more pressing needs for that kind of investment, such as converting the power plants to combined cycle units and increasing transmission interconnections to our local grid.  I have no idea on what the ROI was or will be on the Corpus Christi AMR network.  Maybe Corpus Christi has a lot more people that need to have their power turned on and off because of payment/non-payment cycles.  Meter reading itself is not a large labor cost, hence the long ROI projected.

The local business community is pretty much pissed off that nobody local was picked, but I think everybody in this business locally was sure that the RFP as written wasn't financially viable.