Tiny Seaside Town Goes Wi-Fi

HALF MOON BAY, California — It doesn’t seem like a town that would lead an Internet revolution.

By Elisa Batista Wired.com

Almost 12,000 residents call Half Moon Bay, a little burg 20 miles south of San Francisco, home. The citizens are about equal proportions tech workers who commute regularly to San Francisco or Silicon Valley and blue-collar workers who spend the majority of their day in town and don’t see much need for constant Internet connectivity.

"I turn on my computer once a week," said Carla Garcia, a gardener.

But Garcia is one of many people proudly pointing out a feature of her town that is missing elsewhere in the United States: the ability for anyone to log on from anywhere in downtown Half Moon Bay — even from outside on a street corner.

The service, offered by a local ISP called Coastside Net, is a network of Wi-Fi coverage that blankets five blocks of downtown’s Main Street. Anyone in the area who wants Internet access can pull out a Wi-Fi-enabled computer and immediately connect — for a fee ranging from $3 for 15 minutes of access to $15 for three hours of Web surfing.

"I think it’s cool that there are a lot of people into it even though I’m not," Garcia said.

Residents and visitors who rely heavily on the Internet for work and for play couldn’t agree more. They are relieved that they no longer have to trek down to the local library to get access or pay steep per-minute charges to use an Internet kiosk at the trendy La Di Da coffee shop on Purissima Street.

Even the café has gotten into the spirit — La Di Da has taken down its kiosk in favor of promoting the Coastside Wi-Fi service, said Emily Bajda, a cafe employee.

"We have gotten a lot more clientele and a lot more people who come in and ask, ‘Do you have wireless?’" Bajda said. "I tell them, ‘We sure do. Come in.’"

"I expect to get wireless (gear) in the next few weeks," said Steve Horne, an engineer who was doing some work recently on his laptop at La Di Da.

Wi-Fi, of course, is nothing new. Some Starbucks coffee shops, several McDonalds’ restaurants in New York and other businesses across the country have rolled out Wi-Fi service. But customers must sit near Wi-Fi access points situated throughout the businesses in order to use the services.

Unlike the Half Moon Bay users, they can’t perch on a bench a block down the street from the coffee shop, open up their laptops and do their work.

"Starbucks will only cover inside of Starbucks," said Eric Gotfrid, director of operations for Coastside. "We figure we can go head-to-head with them."

The group shopped its idea around before it tapped FHP Wireless, a Wi-Fi infrastructure company in nearby San Mateo, to help build it.

To power the service, FHP’s equipment piggybacks off two T1 lines in Coastside’s Main Street office and its signals jump from one antenna to another to provide users with wide-area, consistent broadband Internet service.

Antennas are strategically placed along Main Street and the relay scheme among the antennas is a cheap and easy way to give Internet access to a lot of people, said Bert Williams, vice president of marketing for FHP.

"The issue with access points is that they require wired backhaul," Williams said. "If you are going to install that on a large scale, you are talking about putting in a lot of DSL connections in cities."

That’s one of the system’s drawbacks. All wireless systems still must be powered by a wired Internet backbone and anybody who wants to use that infrastructure requires the owner’s approval. In this case, the owner is Coastside. But in other areas, an ISP might try to network existing infrastructure paid for by separate parties for home or business use.

"Free isn’t free," said Alan Reiter, president of consulting group Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing. "Who pays for the high-speed line?"

Another issue is antennas. They can be eyesores and their placement requires the approval of a private property owner, the city or an agency.

Reiter said he expects networks like the one in Half Moon Bay to find success in rural communities and in areas where land-line service providers are limited. Because the land-line providers — the phone and cable companies — own the pipes, they easily could offer cheaper service than wireless ISPs, he said.

But as the people of Half Moon Bay have learned, the bigger company doesn’t always offer the better service.

Horne (the engineer with the laptop in La Di Da) lives in nearby El Granada, where he has Internet access through the cable company, Comcast. So far, the company, he said, has been unresponsive to any technical hurdles he has encountered with the service.

"The (customer-service) hotline is pretty much useless," Horne said.

Now he is helping Coastside find a spot in his area to put up an antenna. Because Coastside is a small company with less funding, "they have a much greater need to look after their client base," Horne said.

"The advantage of wireless is that it is relatively cheap to install," he said. "Small companies like Coastside can cover an entire area and compete with the cable company."

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