WillR's blog

Ran into Bob Avery, the Town's IT Director, on Franklin St. today. Turns out he's surveying Downtown with an eye towards deploying a small pilot program of free Internet hot spots in the near future. The pilot would use Clearwire as the high-speed wireless backhaul. The only resources needed are power and location.

I cautioned Bob not to limit his planning to publicly owned infrastructure like the old Townhall. Over the last four years I've spoken with more than a few Downtown business and building owners willing to provide a small chunk of space and the minimal juice for access point deployments. BrianR and I have explored using solar-powered, weather-hardened rigs, strategically meshed to cover a wide area. If the Town used this environmentally sound and quite economical approach, the only remaining requirement is a decent position to throw signal.

Chapel Hill is missing an excellent opportunity to deploy up to a hundred Internet hotspots along our transit corridors. Last week, the town signed a contract with NextBus, Inc. to provide, at a cost of $949,030, digital signs at 14 bus stops to inform riders of expected bus ETAs. NextBus, unlike competitors Motorola and Cityspace, uses last-gen cell technology over next-gen WiFi-MESH.

Instead of purchasing an open standards system utilizing WiFi/WiMAX wireless technology - technology allowing Chapel Hill to provide ubiquitous communication services to police, fire, public works and the general public from as many as 100 bus stops along the 26 bus transit routes - the town's transit department recently endorsed NextBus' proprietary cellphone-based bus-tracking system.

Specifically, NextBus is providing 14 digital signs, tracking of 83 vehicles and web-reporting on 26 routes for $949,030.

Nancy Suttenfield, a key UNC "mover-n-shaker" since 2000, current member on many Town-n-Gown related boards, is leaving UNC and is headed to Wake Forest.

Nancy's been quite busy both at UNC overseeing the recent tidal wave of capital expenditures. She's also been involved in a number of Town-n-Gown outreach efforts, such as Kevin Foy's Downtown Partnership. Not only did she help form UNC's new Carolina North committee, she's one of UNC's key representatives on that committee.

I wonder if her leaving will change the current shaky dynamic of that committee?

More from today's Herald-Sun.