Date: October 19, 2006

Presenter: THenry Vargas, V3 Technology Solutions

The guest speaker was Henry Vargas, President of V3 Technology Solutions. Mr. Vargas was featured in the recent Omaha World Herald (Project Aims for a Wireless Omaha) which highlighted efforts by V3 to cover LaVista and "Wireless Omaha" to light up Elmwood Park, UNO, PKI and adjacent areas. V3 was also cited in a press release for the Wi-Fi installation at the Cox Classic this summer.

Henry has over 31 years in the Information Technology field. Prior to retirement from a career at USWest / Qwest, he was responsible for managing up to 28 engineers and operations personnel in the design, configuration, and deployment of the internal wired and wireless networks. He introduced the first Ethernet network hub using twisted-pair cabling before 10Base-T was a standard. Henry also wrote and published the cabling standard, which is still being used today across the 14-state territory by Qwest. He currently is an Adjunct Instructor at Creighton University for "Network Design and Telecommunications Management".

There is a national policy challenge regarding metro Wi-Fi installations. The "pay model" requires subscription fees for use and generally tends to be higher bandwidth access. Part of the revenues are shared with the local city government as a franchise fee. The trade-off is the lower usage and lack of financial or network accessibility in low income areas of the city.

The "free model" generally uses an advertising method with a fee for the non-advertising, higher speed access. The free access is usually throttled down to accommodate higher user ratios. Although free access has higher acceptance, it may be viewed as unfairly competing with local telephone, cable and ISP businesses. The dilemma for city governments is how to attract a vendor to build and maintain such an expensive infrastructure when there is no guarantee that "free will pay off in the long-run".

Wireless Omaha received a grant to install equipment around UNO. There is a discussion of expanding into low income areas of the city with additional grants and then building out the downtown and other areas. Expanding the free network would be wonderful, but it will take a lot of time to develop the strategy, budget and find the grant.

The metro Wi-Fi build out has been discussed for the past several years and it could continue for several more. Meanwhile, only a few areas around the city have Wi-Fi access (much of that is due to coffee shops and "leaky" corporate networks). Future ITC meetings may focus on the viability of the Wi-Fi build outs in Omaha. Perhaps the ITC can serve as a platform for discussions by the various interests to initiate a strategy for the city. In the minds of many visitors to the city, Wi-Fi access is as important image builder as non-smoking entertainment venues and a vibrant downtown.