Solar WiFi

Sun Don’t Shine on Solar WiFi Town

Posted by samc on January 25th, 2008

St. Louis Park, Minnesota, has abandoned their innovative Solar Powered WiFi hotspots that they installed in the past year, reports the Star Tribune. Some $1 million worth of radios, poles and solar panels, erected because the city lacked rights to utility poles, will now be scrapped.

“The contractor’s default forces St. Louis Park out of planned citywide wireless Internet project,” says a notice on the city’s wireless site. In testing what Arinc had built, the city found that small portions of the network functioned well, providing a high-speed connection. But in other areas, the solar panels were placed in spots where they did not get enough light to power the radios’ batteries.

Salvaging The groundbreaking solar-powered, citywide wireless service could cost another $3 million, on top of more than $800,000 the city already has spent, reports the paper.

“We’re going to tell Arinc, ‘Come get your poles, take them out of the ground, stick them someplace where the solar panels won’t work at all,’” Mayor Jeff Jacobs said.

St. Louis Park may sue Arinc to do so. Next, the city must decide whether to begin anew with a different contractor or abandon the Wi-Fi project altogether.

The service, (FAQ), planned to use about 400 solar panels — each about the size of a stop sign — suspended 20 to 30 feet in the air on public rights-of-way such as roadsides. The panels would connect to batteries for service at night or on cloudy days.

The approximately 200 customers participating in the initial non-solar powered pilot program begun in April of 2006 will continue to receive service pending the City Council’s direction.

St. Louis Park has been working to get citywide wireless for more than two years. Since then, hundreds of residents have participated in a small-scale test run of a Wi-Fi network — one that was not solar-powered and not built by Arinc. Although it wasn’t without problems, the general success of that pilot program convinced the city to take the service citywide.

source : dailywireless.org