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Rio Rancho's hopes of being the first totally wireless city nationwide have been dashed by Grand Haven, Mich. But the Michigan-based company that made it happen is coming to the City of Vision to make Rio Rancho the biggest wireless city in the country.

Azulstar LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ottawa Wireless, has been chosen by city administrator Jim Palenick as the service provider for the city's ubiquitous, wireless broadband Internet system.

A proposed agreement with Azulstar will be presented to the governing body Wednesday night.

Palenick was out of town attending a conference in San Diego, but wrote in his monthly report to the governing body dated Oct. 15 that "the terms of the license agreement are nearly identical to that which was approved for Usurf, except that Azulstar will begin its deployment in early November and have until May 15, 2005, to fully complete the installation. However, it has been indicated by top representatives of Azulstar that it is likely that a full deployment could be completed by Feb. 1, meaning that we could still match the original goal o having a complete deployment of March 15, 2005."

Rio Rancho is trying to work toward having a wireless system that will allow users to connect to the Internet anywhere within a 103-square mile area of the city using portable computers. Its first attempt with Usurf, a Colorado Springs-based company fizzled late this summer when the company bailed on its contract with Rio Rancho.

Tyler van Houwelingen, the chief executive officer and founder of Ottawa Wireless, said his company wants to get started in Rio Rancho and elsewhere in the state.

"We really want to get this thing going," van Houwelingen said in a telephone interview from his Michigan office. "Las Cruces (is) next. We've already got everything more or less ready to begin simultaneously. We're throwing a lot of resources down there to make this happen.

"We hope to make Rio Rancho No. 2, and we know we can make it happen really fast," he said. "We're really excited here. The city has helped out so much, and with Intel there we feel like we're walking into a really good thing. And we think the city and Intel found a good partner in us."

Van Houwelingen said he put forth the Feb. 1 goal and thinks it might be completed faster.

"I think we can do it," he said. "A big piece of it is going to be the recruiting. We need to hire a team and get good people integrated into this system. That always takes the longest. I think that will take longer than the actual deployment of the network.

"Rio Rancho is very straightforward compared to what we had to deal with here in Michigan with all the trees and topography. There are a lot of issues up here compared to what you guys have. We've been targeting the area for a long time. The topography is ideal - it can work real, real well. We've got it working really well up here, but it will even be better down there."

Van Houwelingen said he will attend the council meeting Wednesday and begin looking for the six employees he needs to run the Rio Rancho operation upon the governing body's approval.

"I'm coming down for the meeting on the 27th, and I'm not coming back (to Michigan)," he said.

Van Houwelingen, who once worked as a technical sales engineer for three years before founding his company in 2002, said his company has one advantage over Usurf.

"The most important thing is that we've done it," he said. "We've got it working, and have several hundreds of customers (in Michigan). It takes a lot to get it to work. We've been working on this for a long time, years before most people ever heard of this.

"We've got it all working on a pretty massive scale. We've got the right partners in place to make a citywide Wi-Fi network, taking every thing we learned from Grand Haven and going a step forward. Any other company would either make the same mistakes or have the same limitations we had to go through in Grand Haven.

Van Houwelingen said rates for the wireless service will be similar to Grand Haven. According to the company's Web site, www.ottawawireless.com, rates for mobile connections run from $24.95 to $79.95 monthly, depending on upload and download speeds and the number of e-mail accounts a user wants.

"We're expecting something very similar to what we have in Grand Haven," he said. "In Grand Haven we differentiate between fixed and mobile connections, but we're contemplating down there doing everything as a mobile connection."

Copyright © 2004. The Observer.