Its been a little over 2 years now since DoITT (NYC’s IT department) “released their first RFP”:1 to enable the installation of telecom (read cellular) equipment on lightpoles, and we’ve heard *nothing* about the companies that responded and won franchises.
On July 19, 2007, DoITT “released another RFP” for poletop telecom devices:
bq. The New York City Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications is pleased to release a Request for Proposals (“RFP”) for Franchises for the installation for the installation and use, on City-owned street light poles, traffic light poles, highway sign support poles and certain utility poles located on City streets, of telecommunications equipment and facilities, including base station and access point facilities, in connection with the provision of mobile telecommunications services.
As far as I can tell, the RFP isn’t posted on their website, and NYCwireless wasn’t contacted either (Mr. Brett Sikoff, you should know by now that we are one of the organizations with whom your department should be working). Its entirely unclear what the relationship is between this RFP and the one from 2004, and whether there is a “similar classification structure”:2 to the poletops that are available (where the city was divided into 3 zones, each with its own franchise price per pole).
“Here’s the RFP”:3, which was kindly forwarded to me by a friend.
[1]http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/html/business/poletop_rfp.shtml
[2]http://www.nysia.org/events/past/2005/Mobile%20Telecom%20Franchises.pdf
[3]http://wirelesscommunity.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/poletop-rfp-july-20071.pdf
Filed under: New York City, News, Policy
