Forewarned about the perils of municipal Wi-Fi deployments, the city of Augusta, Ga., is moving ahead with a plan to deploy the broadband wireless technology across a wide swath of the city.

"We've visited and studied several [municipal] sites," said Gary Hewett, Augusta's assistant director of IT, in an interview Wednesday. "We think we can make it work. We're going to buy all the equipment, hang it on city posts, and leave it to an ISP to run customer service."

The state of Georgia has contributed about $600,000 and the city another $281,000 to the project, which is planned to cover a four-square-mile city core center.

In studying other municipal Wi-Fi deployments, city officials found a range of success and failures, so they have attempted to set up a plan that will succeed. The Augusta officials found that ISPs in existing municipal Wi-Fi rollouts were faced with a six- to eight-year wait for return on investment. "That's too long," said Hewitt, who indicated the Augusta ISP will likely have a four-year ROI.

To simplify the rollout and to take some of the expense out for the ISP, the city will partner with the ISP, which will choose the project gear and build out the network; the city will pay for the gear. Hewitt said city officials realize the city has "a weakness in customer service," so the ISP will handle that function. The city of Augusta plans to cover the majority of the network's capital cost, and the chosen ISP will operate the network and share revenue with the city.

Hewitt said the RFP for the network will be announced in about two weeks. The network is expected to be up and running in September. He anticipates customer prices for the service will begin at $19.95 a month.

"We selected areas within the city with the highest household concentration within the city and added the downtown business corridor and three major colleges," Hewitt said. "We then combined that all into our deployment area. The colleges love it." Hewitt added that the idea that the ISP would handle customer service was viewed favorably by the colleges, the Medical College of Georgia, Paine College, and Augusta State University.

What about WiMax as a possible future upgrade? Hewitt said city officials looked at WiMax and decided to forgo any future plans for it "because it looks like a fork-lift upgrade."