Nortel Networks is laying down a mobile and fixed WiMAX network in the Quad Cities, a group of four cities in western Iowa and eastern Illinois clustered around the Mississippi River. Though the initial deployment will be small, consisting of three Nortel Mobile WiMAX base stations, its owner Moline Dispatch Publishing will use it in dual scenarios: providing mobile and portable broadband access on a college campus and home broadband access for the cities’ residents.

The deployment will blanket most of Davenport and Moline, Ill., and Rock Island and Bettendorf, Iowa, providing broadband connections to subscribers of Moline Dispatch’s ISP. Gerald Taylor, the Dispatch’s publisher, said that the company has been in the ISP business for years, using dial-up and unlicensed wireless access to offer Internet service to Quad Cities residents as well as provide an alternate delivery vehicle for news content form its three publications, The Moline Dispatch, The Rock Island Argus and the Leader.

The publishing company’s Internet unit, Quad-Cities Online, however, decided to pursue the higher speeds of WiMAX after it struck a deal with local community college Black Hawk College to use its Educational Broadcast Spectrum at 2.5 GHz in exchange for providing mobile broadband services to students and faculty on Black Hawk’s campus. The spectrum has the same properties as the 2.5 GHz spectrum used by Sprint and Clearwire, allowing Quad-Cities Online to use the same equipment vendors supply for those deployments as well as the same off-the-shelf devices and customer premise equipment Sprint and Clearwire will eventually sell.