Saul Kaplan, head of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF) spoke this morning to the Newport County Chamber of Commerce (NCCC) about their plan, RI-WINS, for bringing wireless broadband to the whole state of Rhode Island. Their nonprofit effort, aimed at supporting business and municipal users, is essentially what Amy Rice has urged the state to develop.

"I think we're going to continue to be the smallest state in the country for some time," said Kaplan, but we can turn that to our advantage by being first with a state-wide network. "We can connect the dots across all entities," he said, and build innovative, transformative applications that create higher-wage jobs.

RI-WINS is a public-private partnership, with heavyweights like CVS, Cox, and Brown already part of the pilot effort that has been conducted over the past year. Government agencies like DCYF have been experimenting with enabling access for caseworkers, and private sector partners like RealWeather are exploring ways to deliver rich weather graphics to sailors on the Bay.

"I don't think we even know today what the most important applications will be," said Kaplan. While explicitly not an end-user tool — Kaplan stressed that they are not competing with ISPs — he imagined municipalities as clients, not just for obvious applications like data in police cars, but targeted wireless hotspots. (Like, say, Town Centers. Hint, hint.)

Right now, the project has completed its successful pilot phase, and has done the analysis to show it can maintain and continue to enhance the system with a non-profit business model. BIF has a request in front of the general assembly — not for any money, but rather just a loan guarantee for the $28M required to complete the buildout.

Technically, the backbone of the system would be ~125 WiMax base stations, which would provide high-speed wireless coverage in dedicated 2.5GHz spectrum from anywhere in the state. Current implementors need WiMax cards, but the standard is being rapidly adopted, and BIF technologist Stuart Freiman anticipates direct support in the Intel chipset within about "12-18 months." Current systems — like municipal offices with WiFi — could be easily bridged to the statewide network, Freiman said.

Attendee Matthew Wainwright, Middletown's IT director, said that they had been considering building out a similar system, but stopped when they heard about RI-WINS. He sits on a group called Government and Municipal Information Services (GMIS) and suggested that the three towns on the Island should put their heads together to think about how to best leverage wireless.

Wrapping up, NCCC excecutive director Keith Stokes called RI-WINS, "one of the most important state efforts" and urged chamber members to support the enabling legislation, due to come up in the House Finance Committee next Tuesday.

Resources
RI-WINS site
RI Economic Development Committee RI-WINS page
What is WiMax? Via Wikipedia