Houston to mission control

Municipal mobile contracts usually fall into one of two categories, according to Chris Hill, vice president of government solutions for Cingular Wireless: those in which the city creates a vehicle allowing its agencies to select from two to four service providers and those in which the city awards a master contract with a primary supplier. Hill is seeing more and more of that second type, for a few reasons.

City officials are learning the benefits of mobile-to-mobile plans that businesses have already enjoyed. (“You can't get any cheaper than free for in-network calls,” Hill said.) Also, as more agencies look to “mobilize” data applications, they're seeing the benefit of cohesion in those apps when managed by a single provider.

City police were early adopters of wireless data applications that allowed them to transmit video to and from squad-car laptops. Now other city employees want their own new toys. Inspectors and home assessors, for example, want the ability to take pictures of houses and other real estate and transmit them back to their office databases in wireless real time.

“That's an area we're seeing now with a lot of momentum,” Hill said.

In Scottsdale, Ariz., Cingular is testing an application that would transmit streaming video images of highway traffic wirelessly, so the city won't need to deploy wires to every roadside camera.

This summer Cingular won a five-year $8 million contract with the city of Houston, including its first citywide contract, worth about $2.7 million, for about 1100 EDGE-enabled PC modem cards. Though the city also signed a five-year contract with Verizon Wireless, Cingular will receive about 80% of Houston's planned mobile expenditures through 2010. In May, Cingular became the sole provider of wireless high-speed data services to all agencies of the state of Tennessee.

“I see that trend [of master mobile contracts from municipalities] continuing over the next few years as folks look to consolidate with a single carrier as much of their wireless business as possible,” Hill said. In a competitive market, even America's fourth largest city doesn't seem big enough.