SHAW - City of Nanaimo WiFi Deal

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Is This The BEST DEAL?

Or A Missed Opportunity?

At the June 24 City Council meeting, Councillor Brennan moved to revisit the SHAW Free WiFi application that was defeated at the June 17 council meeting at which both she and Councillor Pattje were absent during that vote.

After hearing from a SHAW spokesman and anwering a few questions of city IT staff, city council voted to sell SHAW access to different locations around the city for a fee of approximately $47,500 annually. This gives SHAW the right to locate their equipment on various city infrastructure around the city which will ultimately offer WiFi access city wide for their customers. This was the option recommended by city staff, and will provide free WiFi access to exisitng SHAW customers across the city, indoors, outdoors, virtually anyplace once the equipment is in place.

The offer that city staff did not recommend and which council did not seem to give much consideration was the other offer put forward by SHAW which would have seen the city receive no revenue for the use of city infrastructure. In fact this offer would have seen the city pay about $5500/yr which represents the cost of hydro to run the access equipment.The upside of this deal, is that the Free WiFi would have been also available to non-SHAW customers across the city.

The BEST DEAL??

Had the city decided to forgo the $47,500 revenue from SHAW and picked up the $5,500 hydro bill the city of Nanaimo we could have billed Nanaimo as a progressive, forward looking city which now makes City-Wide WiFi FREE for everyone.

Missed Opportunity?
 
You might think a FREE City-Wide WiFi claim could pack quite a punch on our tourism Nanaimo brochures and our 'welcome to Nanaimo' handouts. In fact you might wonder if $53,000/yr. could buy you that kind of publicity and goodwill.