01:45 PM PDT on Wednesday, July 19, 2006

By KGW Staff

The Portland City Council Wednesday voted to blanket all 134 square miles of Portland in a wireless web.

KING

It will be free for anyone to access and will cost taxpayers nothing. Just a few "pockets" of the city won't get service, according to officials, but that will account for only about 5% of the entire coverage area.

The city council awarded Metro-Fi, a Silicon Valley-based company,the exclusive contract to develop Portland’s Wi-Fi network.

Initially, the wireless coverage will include downtown and the inner eastside of the city but full city coverage should come within one to two years, officials said.

The free service will be financed through advertising dollars. However, if viewers don’t want ads to appear on their computers, they can opt to pay $20 a month to use the service banner-free.

The download speed won’t be quite as fast as DSL or cable – only one megabit per second, compared with the four to eight megs of standard high speed.

“I think that would be incredible. I think that would be great. As long as it's a secure, stable network, I think that would be fantastic,” said Internet user Derryck Rosalez.

The new Wi-Fi system will also benefit the city government itself. Now, employees working in the field will be able to use the network to download and upload reports and documents instantly, saving them time and potentially making them more efficient with tax dollars.

Metro-Fi will use its own capital to build and maintain the network. This means Portland will become the only municipality in the country that has brokered this kind of deal, according to city officials.

But, Portland is not the only city working on a free Wi-Fi network. Spokane, Wash. already has one, along with Santa Clara, Calif.

San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and Miami are also currently working to create wireless networks.

(KGW reporter Scott Burton and kgw.com reporter Teresa Bell also contributed to this article.)