Minneapolis Completes Wireless Network

The $20 million Minneapolis wireless Internet network has been completed after 2 1/2 difficult years of technical and political delays. The city's next step: getting the police and fire departments using it. The network -- built under city contract to provide wireless Internet access to residents and communications services to the city -- now has 16,500 private subscribers, said Joe Caldwell, marketing vice president of US Internet, which owns and operates the network. The company hopes to have 30,000 individual customers in three years, as well as to support growing city use of the network, he said.