I’ve been covering the ‘Free’ Milwaukee Wireless story since it broke last Fall, and while I’ve been hopeful that it would go ahead as promised, it now looks like the deal that Milwaukee brokered with Midwest Fiber Networks is no longer a sure thing.

Back in January, I expressed some concern about the proposal:

I’ve been quite vocal about my concern that the city benefits from what I think is going to be a very successful venture. Benefits mean many things of course, but I’ve believed that the common council and the Mayor’s office should look past the “We’re going to be first” appeal of this project to make sure that in our rush to be first, we don’t give away too much to Midwest Fiber Networks in terms of exclusivity and financial considerations.

And at a Common Council meeting earlier this week, it became apparent that the deal wasn’t going so smooth, with Midwest Fiber Networks not keeping with it’s goal of having the near West side of Milwaukee’s new wireless network up and running by early this Summer. It turns out they haven’t even started working on it yet.

In an article the Journal Sentinel ran on these events, the owners of Midwest Fiber Networks couldn’t be reached for comment, which I found more than a bit odd and worrying. These are the same folks who were in front of every reporter and camera they could find last fall when negotiations were taking place – one of the owners even commented on my weblog a few times – and now they’re nowhere to be found.

Dragging their feet to get the work done and not answering media inquires are two troubling signs in this deal from Midwest Fiber Networks, and frankly they have a reputation for this kind of behavior in past deals, which is why I and a number of other IT professionals in Milwaukee expressed concern about the city relying on them for our wireless plans.

There’s supposed to be more information coming out about this soon, and I’ll be sure to pass it along as usual. For now though, the plans for Milwaukee to have wireless coverage anytime soon doesn’t look promising.

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