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Blue Horizon and Globetel bid on Sacramento

City lures four Wi-Fi proposals
Giants of networking will compete to build system for capital.

Some high-tech and telecom industry heavyweights -- including AT&T, Cisco and Intel -- are among the four groups of bidders that submitted proposals to blanket Sacramento with wireless Internet service, a city official said Monday.

http://www.sacbee.com/103/story/32877.html
The proposals were received Friday and a panel of local government and education officials will gather Wednesday to begin evaluating the bids, said Stephen Ferguson, Sacramento's chief information officer.

Among the companies bidding on the project are partnerships that include AT&T Inc., Intel Corp., IBM, Nortel Networks Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.

Ferguson said he is pleased with the caliber of bidders, but doesn't anticipate a perfect offer. "We aren't expecting any of them to meet every term and condition" in our proposal request, he said.

Among the city's requirements: construction of the system at no cost to the public, free unlimited Wi-Fi connections at 300 kilobits per second or faster, free service for city government use at 1 megabit per second or faster, and coverage of 95 percent of the city's 100 square miles within two years.

After the committee evaluates the proposals, they will be ranked and submitted to the Sacramento City Council. If the council is satisfied with the leading candidate, Ferguson will begin final contract negotiations. A final contract could be approved in December with construction starting 30 to 45 days later.

Service in the downtown area could go live within three months of the contract's approval, said Thanh Vo, the city's Wi-Fi project manager. The entire city could be covered within two years.

Perhaps the most star-studded bid comes from a group calling itself Sacramento Metro Connect. It includes IBM, Cisco, Intel, SeaKay Inc. and AzulStar Inc. That group, minus Intel and operating under the name Silicon Valley Metro Connect, recently won a contract to build a major Wi-Fi network covering 1,500 square miles of Silicon Valley with access to 2.4 million residents.

Another partnership -- AT&T and MetroFi Inc. -- also is in the running. Telecommunications giant AT&T has thousands of DSL broadband customers in the Sacramento area, while MetroFi runs wireless networks in three Silicon Valley cities and recently won a contract for a similar system in Portland, Ore.

Two other groups -- both unsuccessful bidders in the 1,500-square-mile Silicon Valley project -- also submitted proposals:

• A partnership formed by Ubiquity Broadband Communications, Fire2Wire and Nortel Networks;

• A partnership of Blue Horizon Group Inc. and Globetel Communications LLC.

This is the second effort by Sacramento to establish a citywide Wi-Fi network. Earlier this year, a Maryland-based company called MobilePro Inc. had an agreement to build such a system, but it withdrew from the deal in June after the city added new requirements, such as free, unlimited Wi-Fi for all users.