Back on July 20 a request was sent to Tarak Bolt, Enterprise Account Manager for Frontier, asking that he provide us capital and service cost numbers for the defined Wi-Fi initiative area as the network grew from covering 100 simultaneous users to covering more simultaneous users up to 2000.  We wanted to know at what point in the growth process would additional capital expenses be needed to install additional hardware to accommodated the required increased bandwidth, and what would the increase in the Monthly Recurring Charge (MRC) be.

On August 14, 2012 we received the requested information from Tarak:

John,

Below are budgetary quotes associated with growth of this WiFi infrastructure:

Initial Capital Investment:  100-200-500 users =  $325,000

1000 users- Additional $84,742  ---- Total Capital=$409,742

2000 users- Additional $84,742 ---- Total Capital =$494,484

The Monthly Recurring Charge of $1,000.00 would remain constant.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Tarak

Tarak L. Bolt

Enterprise Account Manager

I am reading that as meaning that to cover from 501 to 1000 simultaneous users we need to invest in an additional $84,742 of infrastructure and similarly to cover 1001 to 2000 simultaneous users another $84,742 investment needs to be made.  This sort of step increase was expected.

Keeping the MRC at $1,000 was a pleasant surprise.  Having that be a constant could make lining up sponsors much easier.

This information was incorporated in this Handout distributed at the SWCC meeting August 16, 2012:  WiFiHandout 8-16-12 update.doc

A quick check of cost per month per concurrent user at the 2000 user level over a 5 year time period = (494,484/(5x12)+1000)/2000 = $4.62 per month per concurrent user.

The big unknown is what % of system users will be logged in during peek use hours?  If it is 50%, then you could support 4000 users and the cost is cut in half again.

For comparison it should be noted that the 1Mbps data rate per user that this system would provide is on par with low end of data rate range that could be expected from a DSL connection. The cost per per month of DSL can be in the $20/month range for a low end speed plan. That would be on top of the land line phone service cost.

At this point I am checking on whether the download and upload speeds for the Wi-Fi service in question are symmetrical or not.  For DSL the download speed is usually much faster that the upload speed.  Currently my download speed is 5.9Mbps and my upload speed is .37Mbps.