Wiresaway Out of Business...alas!

Two weeks ago one of the local wireless services unfortunately went out of business; this service had been leasing space on the top of our two water towers and beaming high speed wireless to homes with the properly oriented dish on the roof. My family was one on them, and boy do I miss the speed!

6 years ago when we were approached by wiresaway.com, they wanted to create a village wide hot spot for us that would have made Round Lake on of the first communities to adopt this in the United States. However the trustees (none of the present ones) could not get their hands around the concept and passed on it and we merely leased the space to wiresaway.

At the last board meeting we discussed a couple things and currently have a committee of one (Trustee Brian Brubaker who is highly technically savvy) working on potential solutions to the problem. Among the things we are exploring are:

• Hiring an ISP and continuing to broadcast wireaway.com off the tower and merely collect the fees.
• Creating a more elaborate package where we make the village a hot spot and everyone in the village can access the service for a nominal fee.
• Or something entirely different.
  

I do want to emphasize that in the last few years since I challenged the village and the trustees to run this village with an eye on liability and the bottom line, we have! The reason I say this is because it may not make business sense for us to continue, so while I laid out a few potential options there is an option of nothing. My personal feelings are that I would love to see the village be a hot spot.

We are discussing it tonight at the village board meeting so I might be able to report on what direction we are moving in.