Monday Business Roundup

Boulder Joins Wireless Gold Rush

By Richard Martin, 6-18-07

Boulder has joined a group of 10 neighboring cities that are planning a new municipal wireless network that would blanket an area of roughly 137 square miles with WiFi coverage. Last week the City Council agreed to join with Colorado Wireless Communities – a consortium that includes Golden, Superior, Louisville and six other cities in Jefferson and Boulder counties – to negotiate with a vendor to build a WiFi network.

The surrounding cities thus join a nationwide trend that has seen cities from Seattle to St. Cloud, Fla. jump into the muni WiFi market – a market that relies on inflated coverage promises, dubious business models, and questionable economic benefits. A growing number of publications including Forbes, Business Week, and InformationWeek have questioned the muni-WiFi charge, noting that several cities have already had to nearly double the number of radio-frequency transceivers or WiFi access points to achieve the promised 95-percent coverage, and two of the leading providers of municipal wireless networks, EarthLink and MetroFi, have both said they are reviewing their business models and will stop offering free, ad-supported networks.

The Colorado Wireless project is looking at two proposals, from vendors that have not yet been named.

In other business news:

-- A year ahead of the expected visitor boom from the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the tourism industry in Colorado is already seeing record highs, with with 26.9 million overnight visitors in 2006 who spent $8.9 billion in the state, both record highs. As usual the ski industry led the way, with visitors up 10 percent over 2005. Not content with success, the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau has launched a new ad campaign called “Know What the Locals Know” – perhaps to give convention-goers an insider’s sense of the real Denver.

-- Also booming is office space in downtown Denver, with rates in some high-end office buildings topping $40 per square foot – close to the inflation-adjusted rents seen in the early-80s energy boom. The Rocky Mountain News story on downtown rents, however, glosses over the fact that will likely reverse this trend: 1.3 million square feet of new office space, much of it in high-end office towers like Two Tabor, are now under construction, a building spree that will far outpace demand over the next five years.

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