(Reston, VA) The mayor of St. Cloud, FL said today at the Digital Cities Expo that the press reports yesterday about problems with the city’s high-profile free Wi-Fi project are distorted. Mayor Glenn Sangiovanni said the city’s ground-breaking municipal broadband service, which launched on March 6, is doing very well, achieving its goal of supporting city functions and providing no-cost broadband to citizens.
“If you talk to two or three people who are not happy, that is the story,” Sangiovanni said. “They don’t talk to the 97% [of users] who are.”
Usage statistics tell a more positive story, he argued. From March 6 through April 19, 36% of the residents registered for the service. Over that same time period, the network registered 50,900 sessions with the average session length of 3.79 hours.
Equally important, the city’s services have experienced tremendous benefits, a key goal of the project. “Just on the public safety side, look at the benefits,” Sangiovanni said.
There are bound to be problems during this “soft opening” time period of the network, he said. But citizens are advised to test out the service before before disconnecting their current broadband connections. Sangiovanni said that citizens are told to “hang onto your provider until you’re comfortable with CyberSpot [the name of the service] and then get rid of your subscription.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 11:18 AM|Comments(0)
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