Muni Wi-Fi hits wall of economic and political realities
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Municipal Wi-Fi, full of promise and hype over the past two years, has hit the wall of reality in the U.S. because of economics, politics and even the technology.
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New York is on the verge of becoming a wireless city, but not everyone is happy about the prospect.
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 12  /PRNewswire/ -- From trend-setting twenty- somethings to jet-setting road warriors, there is a Wi-Fi(R) phone for everyone.
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A plan to have private investors build a national wireless broadband network for emergency workers met resistance.
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There could be trouble when metro-scale Wi-Fi systems run in the same areas as unrelated WLANs, but there are ways to minimize the effects of this interference, says columnist Craig. J. Mathias.
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Microsoft research found that municipal Wi-Fi is plagued by end-user problems, but demand is still high.
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The bloom is off the municipal Wi-Fi rose, according to attendees at a conference who said rollouts of wireless networks in U.S. cities are being slowed by technical concerns and other issues.
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Prepares to enter broadband era with Wi-Fi adaptor
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Investor's Business Daily - Offices still lag homes when it comes to wireless networking, or Wi-Fi. But they're catching up.
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Ambitious plans for big Wi-Fi networks to provide free or low-cost wireless Internet access are being abandoned or scaled back by US cities as the economics of the deals turn out to be more challenging than expected.
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EarthLink's contract to build a municipal Wi-Fi network in San Francisco appears to be a victim of the company's financial struggle.
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A year ago, it seemed like just about every major U.S. city was drawing up ambitious plans to build wireless Internet networks so more people, both rich and poor, could have online access wherever they wanted.
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Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's Wi-Fi The number of workers in the UK who admitted they "hijack" the wireless connection of others has gone up from six per cent to 11 per cent over the last 12 months. Globally the figure is 12 per cent*, with big increases all over the world.â¦
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Some U.S. lawmakers want wireless networks to be opened up to new devices and applications, and they questioned expensive early termination fees on wireless service contracts.
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(InfoWorld) - Despite the tribulations of launching a regional wireless Internet network, some cities are making progress by sharing their hard-won lessons. Stung by criticism of high cost, flaky service and pandering to recreational Web surfers, cities can justify their investment in free wireless service by using the networks to support public safety radio traffic, attract new businesses and abolish the "digital divide" that can stop low-income workers from landing Internet-age jobs. That's the message from government technology workers gathered at the MuniWireless 2007 conference in Newton, Massachusetts. Ubiquitous wireless coverage could also improve residents' lives by offering automated traffic monitoring, parking enforcement and meter reading, they said. But sometimes even those goals fail to sustain public support when a network hits surprise hurdles, said Bill Oates, chief information officer for Boston. The city had been running its new Wi-Fi network for a month in the blocks surrounding city hall when citizens began to complain that the Internet service provider used a content filter that blocked certain Web sites. "We will keep hitting bumps in the road, we know that. But sometimes it makes you ask if it's WiMax versus Wi-Fi versus 'Why even try?'," Oates said Tuesday in a conference session. Cities can also face a challenge when the local historical society complains that wireless antennas can harm the architectural appearance of city buildings. City workers in Malden, Massachusetts, found a way around that problem by fitting a Wi-Fi antenna inside the storefront sign of a local bar. The business owner was happy to donate the location in exchange for a strong signal, and the new node boosted coverage in a heavily populated part of town, said Anthony Rodrigues, the city's director of information technology. That example illustrates that the politics of launching a wireless network can be a tougher challenge than the technology, Rodrigues said. It is fairly easy to link the networks in neighboring towns to share coverage areas or fire response, but much harder to persuade elected leaders to talk about funding the effort or agreeing who will control the network. The political hurdle applies far beyond the borders of New England, where the conference is taking place, said Esme Vos, the founder of MuniWireless.com , a blog and sponsor of the conference. Until recently, public wireless networks have existed only in major cities with large budgets, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston and Portland, Oregon, she said. But across the U.S., the number of municipalities with planned or deployed public broadband networks has risen from 122 in July 2005 to 385 in May 2007, according to MuniWireless. The downside of that success has been increased public scrutiny of the investment involved, and demands from some taxpayers that the networks should be financially self-sufficient. That pressure has pushed the industry to consider many new business models, borrowing ideas like the advertising embedded in text messages or commercials that play over cell phones, she said. Others have asked government regulators to force content providers to bundle free wireless access with existing cable television, phone service, wired Internet access, VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and IP television packages. However, Vos is passionate that governments should not insist that municipal Wi-Fi pay for itself, just as they don't require public utilities and paved highways to run at a profit. Governments throughout Europe already support public networks that way, not only in urban centers like Stockholm, Paris, Amsterdam and Milan, but throughout rural regions, she said. In the meantime, municipal technology leaders in the U.S. should continue to hone their skills at expanding coverage and supporting reliable service. "There have been a lot of negative stories in the press recently, saying 'these things don't work'," Vos said. "But people are learning from their mistakes. If you have to use 40 nodes instead of 20 nodes to cover the area, we can learn from that."ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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Backers of a Philadelphia Wi-Fi project are worried that a bill going through the state legislature would spike a plan to blanket the city with free or inexpensive wireless access. [Broadband Blog]