Although Baltimore City doesn?t want to cough up any money, that didn?t stop about 40 potential vendors hoping to win a wireless Internet contract from meeting with city officials Monday.
“The hardest challenge is to sell the industry that this has to be free,” said Mario Armstrong, the city?s technology advocate, shortly before the meeting began in the board room of the Baltimore Development Corporation.
“We don?t want the taxpayers to have to pay for this,” Armstrong said.
Residents would have to pay a nominal fee for network access but the winning bidder ? not the city ? would pay for installing and servicing the network, he added.
That access fee should be less than $20 per month, he said.
The city billed the meeting as a “request for information” allowing companies to ask city agencies what they want in their wireless Internet network. The companies will submit their proposals by Aug. 30.
Armstrong said he was surprised by the turnout.
“We?ve got a variety of companies from local vendors, such as Port Networks, to major corporations, such as Earthlink,” Armstrong said.
The meeting, which lasted about an hour, included officials from the city?s purchasing, cable andcommunications and information technology agencies.
“At this point, the city has no deadline to move forward,” Felicia Oliver, an engineer with Baltimore?s bureau of purchases, told the vendors.
“This is just for information purposes,” she said.
The project is part of Baltimore Mayor Martin O?Malley?s “Connected Communities, Connected City” initiative aimed at providing city-wide wireless Internet access with the goal of making residents in the city?s public housing the first to be online.
