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NewsGlobe: Today's News
IBM Gets $4 Million Wireless Contract From Brownsville, Texas
IBM Will Help Brownsville Develop A Network To Empower City Groups
by Jim Barthold
IBM has entered into a $4 million agreement with Brownsville,
Texas to develop and implement a WiMAX-Wi-Fi municipal
wireless network that will primarily serve to improve
operational efficiencies within city agencies.
“They’re really focusing on the real business value of these
network,” said Riz Kaliq, global business executive for digital
communities at IBM, which will be paid to consult and assess
the implementation of the network. “IBM has been advocating
for a long time now that the build-it-for-free networks in the
longer term don’t have the ability, nor do they have the
business model, to be viable.”
Brownsville, Kaliq said, is embracing an increasingly popular
municipal model: using outside help to develop the network
and outsource its day-to-day operations to a more traditional
wireless service provider, while using the foundation network
to offset city expenses. In this case, Rioplex Wireless will
maintain the network with three towers that deliver Internet
coverage via WiMAX technology.
“The government, as it becomes leaner and starts to look to
cut budget constraints, is going to look to private industry to
do what it does best, which is the IT systems and things like
that,” said Khaliq. “The governments are not in the business
of being the service providers … so a lot of the skills that
traditional operators have when it comes down to OSS, BSS
and so on could be a play in this whole space.”
The first municipal wireless networks were reactions by
communities frustrated with the broadband availability being
provided by incumbent service providers. As the technology
matured, so did the municipalities, and this in turn has
created a new business model that uses the networks to
benefit the government itself – including public safety/first
responders – and then expands into residential and
commercial spaces if needed.
“They didn’t understand what the real value of wireless is,
what the real value of mobility is and how they could use it for
their benefit from digital inclusion but also from mobility of
field-based employees,” Khaliq said. “Most government
employees are supposed to be in the field … but they’re
spending a tremendous amount of time traveling to the
office, picking up files and things like that which could be
completely eliminated by wireless enablement.”
IBM will help Brownsville develop a network to empower city
groups, including offices, utilities, ambulance, police and fire
departments and help the city form a non-profit organization
to provide wireless Internet access to the citizenry.
“It’s a data network as it starts off, but as voice-over-IP
becomes more popular and the VoIP devices become more
viable, that’s going to change the paradigm,” he said. “This is
still WiMAX backhaul right now (with Wi-Fi mesh as the end
delivery method) but once the mobile WiMAX gets ratified,
that could be added on.”
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