Oakland county, Michigan chose a company called MichTel communications to build, own and operate a wireless network covering 910 square miles encompassing seven pilot communities including Troy, Birmingham, Madison Heights, Royal Oak, Oak Park, Pontiac and Wixom.  This project is estimated to cost up to $100 Million dollars.   I thought this interesting because the company is so small. It has 15 employees and a reported revenue for 2004 of $3 million. It is apparently financing the project itself with help from its third party suppliers, which now include Cisco. A firm called RF Connect is acting as designer. The monthly cost for maintaining the network is estimated at $1 million. Estimates are that a 10% take rate of the county's 1.2 million homes and 40,000 businesses will net a $53 million revenue stream in the first full year of operation. Maybe so. I cannot help but be personally scared to hear numbers like that. That would make this one relatively small company the largest broadband wireless play in the country if not the world. My real world experience tells me that ubiquitous coverage won't be so easy to achieve. Certainly the amount of money being thrown at this would indicate they are going for very comprehensive coverage. There were no details on the network but one has to think that more bandwidth than simple Wi-Fi will be necessary to make something like this work. Certainly this company is not alone. I know several who are doing similar plays. The motivation by the cities is clear. Being a wireless county gets them in the door when recruiting industry so they say. That is a powerful need. I hope that a lot of these projects don't crash and burn from overreaching. Tim Sanders,   tim@thefinalmile.net   www.thefinalmile.net   www.wimaxglobalnews.com