Sanford (Florida), a city of 50,000 people located north of Orlando, has recently deployed a downtown wireless hotzone at a cost to the city of $30,000 (the total cost was $55,000, part of which was borne by the city’s partner). Sanford (Florida), a city of 50,000 people located north of Orlando, has recently deployed a downtown Wi-Fi hotzone (10 blocks) at a cost to the city of $30,000 (the total cost was $55,000, part of which was borne by the city’s partner, F4W, a company based in Lake Mary, Florida). F4W recently won a regional technology award for the Sanford Wi-Fi network.
The network provides Wi-Fi access in all the outdoor public areas of downtown Sanford and some of the indoor areas of restaurants and caf?©s along the main business street. The city deliberately played down expectations; they told residents not to abandon their DSL or cable Internet service.
How did the project come in to being? They put it together as an Economic Development project, so there are no plans for other city departments to use it (the limited geographic area doesn’t make it very useful for other departments). On the other hand, because other departments were not involved, they managed to get it up and running within four months of inception. And because they keep it under $50,000, they avoided having to go through the RFP process.
Being a mesh system, expansion would be technically simple but bureaucratically more complicated. They expect to expand the network in five block increments, based on lobbying by city commissioners and interested residents and businesses. The funding would probably originate from the city’s IT budget which would slow things down.
Given that the fiscal system in Florida has deteriorated considerably in the past six months, it will be difficult to expand the network quickly.
[based on Q&A with Robert Tunis, Economic Development Director for Sanford, Florida]
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