PORT ANGELES — Most of the city’s 63 square miles now can be called a Wi-Fi hot spot.
City Council members voted unanimously this week to accept as complete the $2.7 million Metro-Net system, which extends wireless Internet access to about 80 percent of the city through a “mesh network” of small wireless access points on poles throughout the city.
Port Angeles-based Capacity Provisioning Inc. started installing the 239 access points last July and had until this July to install them all, making the project within budget and ahead of schedule, Police Chief Terry Gallagher said during Tuesday night’s council meeting.
The main goal of the mesh network is to improve law enforcement communication and access to information from individual patrol cars, Gallagher said, though a separate portion of the network is reserved for public use.
“It is everything we thought it might be,” Gallagher said.
101 sign up
Charles “Doc” Beaudette, president of Internet service provider OlyPen, which is maintaining the non-hardware portions of Metro-Net, said 101 people so far have signed up with OlyPen to use the wireless network.
Beaudette said users can subscribe to “fixed-point” network service, in which a device similar to a modem is installed at a home or business and communicates with a nearby wireless access point, or pay a certain amount to access the network through a laptop or other wireless-Internet capable device.
Outside of one free hour per day and 10 free days in 2013, users will pay $5.95 per day, $15.95 per week or $34.95 per month for the mobile Metro-Net service, Beaudette said.
Wastewater plant
Also during Tuesday’s meeting, council members voted unanimously to sign a $570,103 contract with Lynnwood-based Technical Services Inc. to upgrade the hardware and software used to control the city’s wastewater-treatment plant.
The plant’s current computers, which automatically operate and adjust numerous plant components and alert public works staff when issues arise, are at least 20 years old, City Engineer Mike Puntenney said, and replacement parts are no longer made for them.
“The [computers controlling the plant] we have are obsolete. They don’t make them any more,” Puntenney said.
“When they fail, we’re going to be operating that system manually.”
The contract will pay for the replacement with a new system that will have multiple points of data backup so control of the plant will not be lost during a natural disaster or other emergency, Puntenney said.
The new system also will be integrated with the city’s combined sewer overflow stormwater and wastewater system upgrades, integration Puntenney said the current plant computers would not be able to accomplish.
Puntenney said the computer upgrades will not affect customer utility rates.
“We do have this paid for within the wastewater-treatment plant [capital facilities plan] budget for next year,” Puntenney said.
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Reporter Jeremy Schwartz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jschwartz@peninsuladailynews.com.