Things are looking grim for the bi-county wi-fi project. In this Newsday article, where I get the last word, and the followups on MuniWireless and Wifinetnews, the coup de grace may be administered by the combination of e-Path's classification of what kind of company it is, and the cost of pole rental to that classification. Ugh. I had no idea pole costs were so high for a non-telecom classification. Reid Epstein also has another couple of nuggets in there that were news to me. In the county budget for last year, $200K was allocated for the RFP, which I thought was outrageous, but in the article, he reports a spend of a more reasonable $60K.
The whole business model there is shaky, especially with the outdoor network, and the two entrenched incumbents on the island providing fixed services, plus cellular data availability. The network envisioned is in a no-man's land, where it won't have the performance to compete with wired offerings, or the coverage to compete with existing cellular mobility. It was doomed from day one, and the thing that really cheeses me off is that it froze the market for individual municipalities to deploy their own nets, with them waiting two years to see if there really was a free lunch out there. We had substantive discussions underway with a few villages, but these evaporated once this wacky plan came along.
We are able to thrive on Fire Island because we can compete against DSL on price and performance, and we collect normal amounts of revenue for providing what has become an essential commodity in a niche market. Now that we have a substantial existing customer base, we can use those cash flows to build higher tiers of service to take us beyond our current offerings into higher performance services, where it will be possible to support VoIP, adding another revenue stream.
Somebody should just put this dog out of its misery.
My friend Pam, owner of Klatch Coffee Bar on Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, and her husband JC, have started a summer program for budding entrepreneurs, building a a coffee bar in donated space at the South Street Seaport. 
