Wireless Oakland tryout planned at Arts, Beats and Eats
By Linda Shepard
C & G Staff Writer
An Oakland County “tech cloud” tryout will be part of this year’s Arts, Beats and Eats four-day festival in Pontiac over Labor Day weekend.
At his February State of the County address, Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson proposed Wireless Oakland — a new program that would blanket the area with wireless Internet service.
“We’ve selected the festival as the perfect opportunity for a demo site,” said Patterson May 31. “It’s what it will be like in the next year and a half throughout the county. We’ll see how it works.” The wireless area will be between Saginaw and Wide Track, and Water Street and University Drive for the festival.
Patterson said a portion of the wireless Internet bandwidth will be free to all of the county’s 1.2 million residents, more than 40,000 businesses, and countless visitors. A timeline slates Wireless Oakland to be in full operation in early 2007.
According to Patterson, the county-wide wireless plan will be accomplished through public/private partnerships and will attempt to address the current “digital divide” between computer technology-savvy, highly educated residents and the undereducated, who could gain resources to skills necessary for high-tech employment.
A key objective is to provide free high-speed Internet access to every person in the county — including businesses, residents and visitors.
County officials will offer private industry free access to all county-owned infrastructure, including buildings, tornado siren poles, communication towers, traffic signals and unused fiber optic cable.
Participating companies would affix the necessary hardware to the infrastructure to build a wireless network. In return, the county would receive free Internet access, and the companies would have an opportunity to implement a business model that includes charging fees for advertising or additional services on top of basic wireless access.
According to Patterson, Oakland County officials received 45 responses from potential vendors eager to become part of the project. Patterson said the number of companies responding to the request for qualifications was much higher than expected. “I think the level of interest shown bodes well for the ultimate success of this project,” he said.
Public and private partners will be selected by August. Patterson hopes to have several pilots before the end of the year and stressed that Oakland County will not own, operate or build Wireless Oakland.
The Troy City Council unanimously approved support for the Wireless Oakland County project in April and requested to be selected as a pilot community. “I was present when this idea was presented, and I knew immediately that Troy should be a pilot community,” Troy Mayor Louise Schilling said.
Several other communities in Oakland County would like to be chosen for the pilot program as well.
“We are not only looking forward to Pontiac as a demo for Wireless Oakland (at Arts, Beats and Eats), we also want to be a pilot city,” Pontiac Mayor Willie Payne said.