As the cities abandoned by EarthLink and MetroFi’s failed muni Wi-Fi business models scramble to come up with workable solutions, Oklahoma City officially launches its expansive city-wide Wi-Fi with very little fanfare and a tremendous degree of success.

Proving the old adage that “slow and steady wins the race,” Oklahoma City, OK scored a quiet victory recently with the official launch of its city-wide Wi-Fi network, which it believes is the largest Wi-Fi network built for municipal use in the world.

Unveiled June 3^rd, the wireless network covers a 555 square-mile area of the city’s 621 square miles. Rather than offering access to the public, either via “bridge the digital divide” initiatives that offer free or discounted Wi-Fi to low-income residents, or by charging as an ISP, OKC has focused its efforts on providing access to government employees and running municipal applications—a formula that has met with success.

Safety first

Police officers in the city of roughly 529,000 people are now equipped with laptops in patrol cars, which can wirelessly access vital information about crime scenes in real time. They can also download photos, file reports, and do paperwork in the field, thus improving efficiency and accuracy.

According to Mark Meier, IT Director for the City of Oklahoma City, approximately 3,000 municipal employees using roughly 1,200 devices routinely access the Wi-Fi network, and within the urban center of OKC (roughly 225 square miles), coverage is at 95 percent. Of the 230-square miles of rural Oklahoma City, Meier says his team has achieved 95% coverage along all of the major roadways, allowing municipal workers and first responders to have reliable access en route to a call or job site, as well as whenever they are within range of a major artery.

“The concept of getting data communications to your police and fire units, it’s ubiquitous,” says Meier. “The emergency response teams—police and fire—would be able to respond to calls more effectively with fewer mistakes on addressing and immediate access to the calling party.”

The impetus for the network came not from a desire to provide city-wide Wi-Fi to the residents of Oklahoma City, but rather from a need to update an aging 911 system.

“We needed to replace our 20-year-old system,” says Meier. “We had the option of saying, ‘we’ll put in the traditional in-car replacement, about 19.2 baud, shared among 500 users,’ or we can offer something else that provides tremendous value. This [Wi-Fi solution] replaces technology that was more expensive and gives a wide variety of options.”

Dollar for dollar 

In order to fund its “city owned and operated” Wi-Fi network, the City of Oklahoma City took a unique approach, one that has worked well for the city with other projects—it instituted a sales tax increase devoted to capital improvement.

“This was one piece of an overall public safety sales tax designed to upgrade police, fire, and the courts information systems. One small piece was the wireless component that made all of these pieces viable,” says Meier.

To fund the upgrades, the citizens of Oklahoma City voted in a half-cent increase in their sales tax.

“We do these fairly often,” says Meier. “The city approaches it with a limited duration sales tax to do a specific project or series of projects. That’s leant itself to our success. Our citizens have watched us succeed and then [the tax] goes away.”

Despite having been the site of a devastating terrorist attack—the deadliest act of domestic terror in the history of the U.S.—the Oklahoma City project received only a small bit of ancillary funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

“We received no funding from Homeland Security,” says Meier, “but projects are running across the network. For instance, a 300-camera CCTV network used by the field officers runs across our Wi-Fi system and was partly funded by Homeland Security dollars.”

United we stand

Meier credits the success of the network in large part to the commitment of the Mayor and the city council.

“The Mayor and the Council—in all honesty—that’s the differential I see with the cities that failed. We never had divisiveness, changes of scope occurring in the middle, pet projects being put forward. Like any group of people, they had different desires for the system, but they came together so we could have a clear vision of what we’re trying to accomplish. We’ve had several changes in administration [since the planning began six years ago], but in my memory, we have always had a very strong and cooperative and focused city council,” says Meier.Reaping the rewards

Initially, a budget of $5 million was allocated to the project, before Wi-Fi was selected as the solution of choice. Meier estimates the ongoing operational expenses to be about $200,000 per year, which was lower than the planners had originally anticipated. Meier says that his city has spent its money well.

“Compared to other technologies that we would have implemented, this product was less expensive,” says Meier. “We feel there is a tremendous value. This replaces technology that was more expensive and gives a wide variety of options.”

The specific savings and benefits are hard to quantify dollar-for-dollar, says Meier, but the list of rewards is long.

“They can book a prisoner out in the field and fill out a report one time in the field and have it replicated; they can verify if an individual is wanted or innocent of what he might be accused of. The officer in the field has a reduced amount of time and liability, and better information to make decisions.”

In a city where police can expect to dispatch more than 400,000 calls a year—in FY 06/07 441,890 calls to 911 were dispatched—Meier says the new system can shave 30 minutes to an hour off each call. The fire department also benefits in many ways, including the ability to get a building’s blueprint en route to a fire, or a schematic of how the water system is laid out. And the department of public works is using the Wi-Fi network to handle inspection requests.

“They used to take a call, put in a log, it would be centralized and then get put into a system and a day or two later, they might respond. Now the inspector goes out, goes into the field, and it gets entered into the system on the following day. Contractors used to have to wait until the inspection was complete. Now you have inspectors upload reports immediately to a Web site. Within hours contractors can go back to work. It saves days off every construction project. It’s a tremendous value to our community,” says Meier.

Head over to part 2