Cape & Islands News

Gambling's stars back Wampamoags; Cape-wide Wi-Fi coming

Tribe hits big time: Gambling's stars back Mass. casino bid
For a humble Cape Cod tribe  it’s heady company

They are the superstar investors who made Connecticut's Mohegan Sun one of the world's largest casinos.  And now Sol Kerzner and Len Wolman are poised to embark on their next big venture - bringing casino gambling to the Bay State.

“We see this Northeast market as a huge market" - Len Wolman The two investors and Starwood Capital have teamed up with the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to bankroll the tribe's billion dollar-plus proposal for a destination gambling resort in Southeastern Massachusetts...

And with the addition of some of the top casino investors in the world, the Mashpee Wampanoags have a leg up on the competition as Massachusetts steadily moves toward casino gambling...  There have also been some friendly discussions with Dan Fireman, son of Paul Fireman, the fabulously wealthy and influential Reebok founder who has launched a new career building deluxe golf courses. (The Firemans a few years ago donated 40 acres of land in Mashpee to the tribe.)  Read the rest of this Herald story here.
________________________

Do-it-yourself wireless backbone shaping up in Cape Cod

Currently, OpenCape estimates the commercial transport net will be about $2 million to build, the public net about $3 million.A nonprofit group of wireless pilgrims is venturing into virgin territory to create a regional wireless backhaul net to bring broadband capacity to Cape Cod, Mass., where the original Pilgrims first set foot nearly 400 years earlier.

Just a year after its formation with US$300,000 from a group of Cape Cod colleges, communities and development agencies, the nonprofit OpenCape Corp. is installing the first group of Motorola point-to-point radios, which will eventually form a wireless backbone along the spine of high ground that reaches along the entire arm-shaped Cape, as well as the nearby islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

At the very tip of the Cape is Provincetown, the site of the first landfall of the Pilgrims, on Nov. 21, 1620. A few weeks later, they sailed across Massachusetts Bay to land at Plymouth, a more sheltered site for the first permanent settlement.

The first stage of the project is a pilot network targeted at 100+Mbps, from Cape Cod Community College, through radios mounted on a couple of water towers as well as a university, the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and a municipal electric utility on the mainland. The first link being built is the most technically demanding one: a 20-mile "shot" over water. These initial links will be used to test performance and reliability...  Read the rest of this InfoWorld story here.