Summary: Need help with PR? If you are looking for a great PR firm, you've found one. Walker Sands is a leading Chicago PR firm with a strong track record that makes it one of top national PR agencies..

Who would have thought lamp post tops could be prime real estate? Or that the roads and sidewalks of sleepy towns could be paved with wireless gold?
(article continues below useful links)

Increasingly, wireless players are seeing opportunity in the infrastructure that lines America's streets. Just yesterday, Grand Haven, Mich christened its "hot city," powered by Ottawa Wireless. Also this week, New York City announced plans to kick off a program that rents out the space on pole tops to wireless operators and equipment providers who can use the sites to offer wireless voice or data services.

Although municipalities are known to be budget-constrained, hot-zone providers say there is a real business opportunity in these towns.

"They appreciate the franchise approach to make it easier for a variety of players to come together to provide an end-to-end solution, to turn a municipality into a hot city," says Glen-Eric Nelson, spokesman at Ottawa Wireless.

New York's department of information technology and telecommunications put out a RFP (request for proposal) in February and six companies-T-Mobile, Nextel, IDT, as well as Crown Castle, ClearLinx Networks, and Dianet Communications-jumped at the opportunity to claim rights to the poletop properties. Over the next 15 years, the city plans to gradually rent out up to 18,000 pole tops, no more than 300 by one company each of the three designated zones of the 5 boroughs, for the project, which could eventually bring the city up to $25 million per year in fees, says Jonathan Werbell, spokesman at the department of information technology and telecommunications. However the roll-out, he stressed, will be gradual.

"You won't wake up tomorrow with 18,000 poletops [equipped]," says Werbell.

It is up to the companies renting the poletop property to determine which services they will offer, but Werebell says IDT, for instance, is looking into a low-cost wireless service aimed at folks that don't have a landline phone. He also predicts there will be Wi-Fi access, to enable hotspots, in pockets throughout the city.

As for the health concerns that have cropped up from community members nervous about having RF-emitting equipment next to their homes, Werbell says the city reserves the right to do RF-emission testing at any site as part of the contract to ensure renters are abiding by FCC rules. It's also likely that the proliferation of these smaller deployments will take some of the load off the much larger, or more RF-producing base stations that already exist throughout the city, mainly on rooftops.

As for the Grand Haven deployment, Ottawa Wireless waves aside other deployments powered by metro Wi-Fi players like Tropos Networks (see Tropos Two-Step) and says this is "the first full and complete city-wide Wi-Fi deployment in the country."

Ottawa installed "several hundred" radios made by Proxim throughout the city to enable broadband Internet, with voice over IP services planned as well, says the company. The project was announced a few months back, with the rest of the city now unwired (see Ottawa Wireless, Proxim Wi-Fi Mich. City).

For the Ottawa-powered service, Internet access will start at $19.99 per month for fixed access with an added $5 fee for mobility capabilities. Unlimited VOIP calling will run $29.99 and be commerically available this fall, according to the company.

Ottawa has other neighborhoods and communities in Michigan either up and running or in launch phase, says Nelson, and is garnering attention from international regions for the service, he says.

Copyright © 2004. Wireless IQ.