What Wi-Fi Can Do For Cities

The Wi-Fi 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.

Neal Peirce / Syndicated columnist

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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 and Midtown districts and along the lakefront.

From Corpus Christi, Texas, to the Silicon Valley, at least 50 cities are exploring their own versions of remarkably inexpensive communitywide transmitter nets, mounted every few hundred feet on utility poles and light posts. The new technology, called Wi-Fi (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 in Washington, D.C.

City governments are logical Wi-Fi 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 communitywide Wi-Fi 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 cellphone operations, Wi-Fi operates on an 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.

Wi-Fi 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 Wi-Fi 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, health-care 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 Wi-Fi 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 its rock-bottom cost.

Neal Peirce’s column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is [email protected]

Copyright 2004, Washington Post Writers Group