Any dollar below $4.86b goes to the Treasury; any dollar over is paid by Sprint Nextel. This produced a dilemma. Sprint Nextel has every release to keep costs to $4.86b to the dollar, and they can wrap that in a flag: "Every dollar we spend is a dollar that doesn't go to the U.S. Treasury," Lawrence Krevor, Sprint's senior vice president, government affairs, told the Journal.

However, the cost may be vastly higher than estimated. Sprint Nextel is playing hardball in every negotiation and won't be nearly complete within the three-year required period, which ends soon. Motorola says it's shipped 1% of the needed equipment. Sprint Nextel says it's paid $1.5b of the possible $4.86b. But then the Journal finds stories like the one in Chester County, Penn., where the emergency services director says he's been working for three years to get the fee set for the preliminary studies for communications upgrades without success. He estimates the final cost could be $18.5m to $150m--for one county in Pennsylvania. They might be atypical, but I doubt it.

Interference persists, and AT&T is demanding action due to their own requirement to investigate (at their own expense) any incidents that occur, even when they are apparently mostly or always due to Nextel's gear.

Can't wait for the lawsuits.

In this plan, a public-safety entity will oversee the network, which will be built by the winning commercial bidder at that bidder's expense. The network has to cover 99.3 percent of the US population within 10 years. Problems with this plan include the potential for a lack of bidders, and for a winning bidder to fail during network build-out. At which point, Ars Technica asks, what then?

The company has also added two hardware devices. While originally a hardware firm with a software overlay, the company reorganized itself around applications that could run over many systems, using techniques to improve the quality of service and throughput. They've now introduced hardware again: the Mobile Router for vehicle access, which can handle up to three radios (802.11a/b/g, 4.9 GHz public safety, and cellular), and be used to broadcast video as well. The Mesh Exchange is a mesh node designed to connect to a video camera to push traffic to the rest of a network using 802.11a/b/g and/or 4.9 GHz.

Private analysts now peg the full cost at $30b, according to The Washington Post. The project is 15 months behind at present. In-fighting among departments, a long-standing problem in federal law enforcement, is one of the factors, the inspector general found.

A number of large-scale federal projects have been abandoned in recent years after hundreds of millions or even billions being spent, including an FBI project mentioned in this article, and the next-generation air-traffic control system. Software projects don't scale, and integrated software/hardware projects are always orders of magnitude greater than expected.

For a great book on why projects like this fail, and how to avoid some of those problems, read Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code. He explains how software complexity has outstripped program management capability.

Frontline's two twists are that the existing auctions could be carried out with this provision overlaid on a license, and that they propose an open access model in which there would be no restriction on the types of devices that would be allowed to be used in that frequency range. The licensee would have to resell access on a wholesale basis, too, making it of greater utility to allow the greatest number of different devices.

Competing plans want half of the 60 MHz scheduled for auction to be set aside for a national public safety network that would be operated by a single private operator, such as Verizon. All the proposals are predicated on the infrastructure cost being borne by private parties, obviating public dollars being spent on the buildout, but forgoing federal receipt of perhaps billions of dollars of spectrum bids.

Tropos released a series of 4.9 GHz routers, the Tropos 9000 family, which tie into their MetroMesh architecture for simulation, reporting, and management. The 9532 is dual-band (2.4/4.9 GHz) for fixed outdoor use; the 9432 is a mobile dual-band router; and the 9431 is a single-band 4.9 GHz node. The 9432 is designed to create a hotspot around a mobile vehicle in both 2.4 and 4.9 GHz, while also connecting to the mesh network in either band, with fallover from 4.9 GHz to 2.4 GHz.

The routers will ship in third quarter 2007.