Community leaders in Davenport, Iowa have a strong interest in bringing fiber broadband to their community of 102,000 on the Mississippi River. But without existing public utilities (Davenport is home to Iowa's only private water utility), officials of Iowa's third largest city are hoping to accomplish this goal without the city building the network. Based on the response to a recent Request for Information (RFI) issued by Davenport, their wish may become true.
Davenport has a significant amount of city-owned fiber infrastructure built over the years to connect city facilities. In it's RFI, Davenport invited companies to come to Davenport and, in conjunction with the City, to build a fiber-to-the-premise network capable of gigabit connections to every home and business. And when the deadline for companies to present proposals arrived on April 16th, city officials were very pleased to receive a total of 11 proposals. According to a news release on the City of Davenport's website:
The City received submissions from SiFi Networks, of Morristown N.J.; OFS Fitel, LLC of Lake Stevens, Wash.; Ting Fiber Inc., of Starkville, Miss.; WideOpen Networks, INC, of Blacksburg Va.; Unite Private Networks, LLC, Liberty Mo.; eX2 Technology LLC, of Gretna, Neb.; CenturyLink, of Davenport; First Solutions P3, Inc.; Seattle, Wash.; Metro Fibernet, LLC, of Evansville, Ind.; Lightcore Olds AB; and Mediacom. Mediacom’s submission wasn’t received as instructed but was received ahead of Thursday’s deadline.
During the next step in the process, city officials will be working with Magellan Advisors to sort through the proposals and evaluate each one. Davenport Alderman Bill Boom says the city would like to narrow down the list to a small number, then enter into negotiations that would hopefully lead to a fiber-to-the-premise network being built.
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