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Oh, dear me, but do we have a dandy of a donnybrook shaping up on Mayor Martin Chavez's idea of free, citywide wireless Internet service. There's a meeting this morning at City Hall for respondents to the city's request for proposals who are interested in providing the infrastructure.

City officials might want to duck out for some coffee, because after reading the RFP and talking it over with a few wireless and Internet providers, this is going to get a stiff rebuke.

In the words of Carl Muehlenweg, president of Lobo Internet Services, a wireless provider for nine years, "I think this is Marty Chavez having pure Rio Rancho envy."

What he's talking about is how our friends up the hill a couple of years ago declared with no small amount of moxie their plan to be the first wireless city, with a signal for any and all.

That effort has been, to be charitable, a snicker. It ain't happening in nearly the time frame or level of service planned.

Azulstar, the company that's been driving the roll out, has had well-reported problems.

Without getting terribly geeky, here's what Albuquerque wants: a two-tiered wireless Internet signal covering the entire city that will support not just the basics of Web surfing, e-mail and the like, but phone service and video. Those two tiers are a free, 1 megabit signal for anyone and a premium service at 3 Mb for a "reasonable" cost.

It gets better. The city also wants this generous deployer to supply a secure 4.9 gigahertz signal for the city's private use - fire, police, rescue and such.

There are so many problems here that it boggles. The first is the anti-business nature of the thing.

I'm especially curious to see the Comcast and Qwest lobbyists at the meeting, because it doesn't take a genius to guess what the results for their businesses will be if the city offers a free 1 Mb signal - roughly the equivalent of what we pay them for.

Judging by the RFP, someone at the city seems to think covering a 185-square-mile Southwest city is a plug-and-play operation.

Muehlenweg, one of about six local wireless providers, has been quietly filling broadband gaps that Qwest and Comcast can't or won't. He's been in the wireless trenches and knows where the problems are. He sees, conservatively, a $25 million nut to build out the specifications as written.

Toss in the service issues, and the whole thing is a financial nightmare.

For the RFP requirement that signals be strong enough to penetrate buildings, he offers a dire warning to those who already have campus or business networks - which may be more than you realize.

"You'd have to literally put a wireless access point on every building to get a signal inside," he said. "It's almost impossible. Right now there's 10,000 to 20,000 existing campus wi-fi antennas that will be interrupted, almost 100,000 citywide. Coffee shops, hotels are going to have to deal with this."

This whole thing is a nonstarter. And that's a shame, because the original goal of getting low-income folks Internet access is certainly worthy. But as written, basically a 53-page wish list, it isn't going anywhere. The meeting should be a ball. I think I'll bring my laptop and surf the Internet while I'm there.

Grant's column runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Send e-mail to gene@genegrant.com.