Chapel Hill Technology Advisory Committee

[Terri Buckner <tbuckner AT ibiblio.org>]

A year old, but still relevant.....
http://www.napawash.org/resources/peirce/Peirce_9_14_04.html

WHOLE CITIES AS INTERNET HOTSPOTS? -- THE WiFi REVOLUTION SPREADS

Philadelphia is debating making all 134 square miles of the city the 
world’s largest wireless hotspot. Boston, Atlanta, New York, Los Angeles 
and other cities are considering parallel moves. In Europe, the firm 
HotSpot Amsterdam is set to go citywide in the Dutch capital soon.

A OneCleveland campaign, led by Case Western Reserve University, boasts 
of the thousands of users already logged cost-free onto rapid broadband 
Internet service through the 4,000 wireless transmitters recently 
installed in the University Circle, Midtown and lakefront districts.

From Corpus Christi, Texas, to the Silicon Valley, at least 50 cities 
are actively exploring their own versions of remarkably inexpensive 
community-wide transmitter nets, mounted every few hundred feet on 
utility poles and light posts. The new technology, called WiFi 
(shorthand for wireless fidelity), is increasingly popular as 
manufacturers build receiver chips into laptops and handheld computers.

The broadcast costs are amazingly low. The estimate for mounting a 
network serving all of Philadelphia and its 1.5 million people, for 
example, is just $10 million, or less than $7 a person. “This comes as 
close to a free lunch as I’ve ever seen in my years watching technology,”
says Costis Toregas, recently retired president of Public Technology Inc.
in Washington, D.C.

City governments are logical WiFi network initiators and anchor users, 
creating instant low-cost communications systems for every function from 
police reporting to meter reading, video surveillance to disaster 
management.

Yet once a city network is built, the same equipment can easily provide 
Internet service, including all manner of e-government services and free 
or low-cost web service. Users include lower-income students and 
struggling small businesses likely to find normal commercial broadband 
service ($35 to $65 monthly) unaffordable.

Just this month, little Chaska, Minn., is shaking up the high-speed 
Internet providers by offering all its 7,000 homes city-run wireless 
broadband Internet for $16 monthly.

But there’s no set formula on how community-wide WiFi will develop, says 
Toregas. Government may be an initiator, but it’s not always good at the 
challenges of deployment, marketing and maintenance required. So look 
for a period of intense experimentation with multiple partners -- 
private providers, utilities, chambers of commerce, neighboring 
communities, schools and universities all playing roles.

The progression from “hot spots” such as Internet cafes to “hot cities” 
will quickly have to jump traditional borders to “hot regions,”
notes community communications expert Seth Fearey of Joint Venture 
Silicon Valley. As opposed to radio and tv stations and cell phone 
operations, WiFi operates on unlicensed frequency spectrum. This allows 
for fast experimentation, but also potentially jammed or overlapping 
signals if one city picks one vendor and its neighbor another.

So “it’s absolutely essential communities talk with each other and plan 
ahead-- and given the speed with which this is developing, they can’t 
delay long,” says Fearey.

WiFi Internet will open new possibilities -- for example log-in pages 
that serve as civic bulletin boards, fostering tighter-knit communities. 
But the most exciting vision yet comes from Cleveland, where Edward 
Hundert, Case Western’s president, and Lev Gonick, the school’s chief 
information officer, believe their OneCleveland technology and its 
Internet signal for thousands is just an enabler of something far 
broader. With all of Cleveland and Northeast Ohio in their sights, they 
want to create a national model of applying WiFi technology to bolster 
culture, advance learning, better health services and spread economic 
opportunity to pockets of extreme poverty.

To model its approach, Case Western built an extensive public wireless 
system linking its campus and its University Circle neighbors including 
the world-famous Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, 
Institute of Music, Natural History Museum, Botanical Gardens and four 
dozen other cultural, research, healthcare and government institutions. 
“Every coffee shop, museum space, park here is now wireless enabled,” 
says Gonick, adding “We say it should be like the air your breathe -- 
free and available everywhere.”

Cleveland Mayor Jane Campbell has identified herself closely with the 
OneCleveland initiative, in which such major technology companies as 
Cisco and IBM are also significant players. But the challenge seems
immense: the Census Bureau recently declared Cleveland the nation’s most 
impoverished major city. Technology, notes Gonick, needs to be “not only 
an enabler but a transformative agent for a community very much on the 
edge, with a steep precipice below us.”

The historic reality is that new technologies are like double-bladed 
knives cutting through history -- their positive impacts (like 
television’s amazing imaging revolution) are often offset by 
unanticipated drawbacks (like tv’s social isolation and dumbing-down 
impacts).

But if areawide WiFi telecommunications can deliver even a fraction of 
the benefits its advocates see -- from democratized broadband Internet 
to economic openings for the poor to unleashing university skills for 
cities and regions -- then there’ll be a lot more to proclaim than just 
its rock-bottom cost.

Comments may be addressed to npeirce AT citistates.com