Getting super-fast Internet service in Lawrence is anything but a fast process.

City commissioners on Tuesday didn’t make much headway on deciding whether to offer a $300,000 loan guarantee to Lawrence-based Wicked Broadband to build a pilot project to bring 1 gigabit Internet service to 300 addresses in the downtown area.

Commissioners directed staff members to do more research on how the city could create a policy that treats all potential providers of Internet service in the city equally, but commissioners also kept alive the idea of offering financial incentives to Wicked.

That left in limbo a proposal by a Baldwin City-based company to begin providing some gigabit service to homes and businesses in the second quarter of 2015.

“We still have a lot of questions and uncertainty based on what we heard tonight,” said Mike Bosch, co-founder of RG Fiber.

Bosch told commissioners that he has the financing in place to begin offering gigabit service in parts of Lawrence next year. He said an owner of the large Kansas City-area utility contractor K&W Underground had made a major investment in his company, as had the former owner of the large pest control company Schendel Pest Control. RG Fiber is committed to launching a gigabit fiber project in Baldwin City in the spring, and the city administrator for Baldwin came to Tuesday’s meeting to speak on behalf of RG Fiber.

But Bosch told commissioners that if the city provides financial incentives to Wicked, he would pull plans for the Lawrence project because his investors would feel like they were competing against the city.

Josh Montgomery, an owner of Wicked Broadband, told commissioners that his company was the city’s best bet at getting gigabit service to Lawrence. He said commissioners should be wary of RG Fiber’s claim that it can complete a Lawrence project without any government subsidies.

“Anybody who thinks they can build a network without subsidies is inexperienced, ignorant and unrealistic,” Montgomery said.

As for commissioners, they mainly were just befuddled. Commissioners have been dealing with the question of how to bring gigabit service — which is the same type of super-fast Internet being offered by Google Fiber in Kansas City — for months. On Tuesday, they said they first want to create a written policy that will guide how the city makes available unused city-owned fiber to private Internet service providers. The policy is expected to establish a market rate for use of the fiber, but also would provide exceptions for companies that provide free service to low income users and nonprofits, for example. Wicked Broadband provides some free service to those two groups currently.

The policy, however, is not expected to weigh in on the question of whether the city should provide the $300,000 loan guarantee that Wicked said is critical to its project. Commissioners said they would take that issue up at a later time. Mayor Mike Amyx said he still hoped to have the question of incentives for Wicked decided by Nov. 11.

In other news, commissioners:

• Agreed on a 3-2 vote to allow Yantra Services to have a seating area for its employees on the public sidewalk in front of their office building at 840 Massachusetts St. The vote marked the first time the city has approved a sidewalk seating area for a non-restaurant or bar business. Amyx and Commissioner Bob Schumm voted against the proposal because they feared it would create a precedent for many other downtown businesses to use the public sidewalks for business purposes.