EVEN if you trust your city to collect the garbage, run your children鈥檚 schools and light the streets, do you really want it in charge of your internet connection? That鈥檚 what is now happening from Taipei to Toronto, with city councils scrambling to provide cheap city-wide wireless internet access alongside their more mundane municipal offerings. This month Washington DC became the latest to announce plans to build a city-wide wireless internet service, including free access for low-income homes.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, some 4000 lamp posts across 350 square kilometres will soon be sprouting Wi-Fi antennas that will blanket the city with wireless broadband signals. The promise is of 1-megabit-per-second net access for less than $10 per month, against $45 for a wired broadband connection today. Google is part of a consortium hoping to do the same for San Francisco, and in the UK, nine localities, including Cambridge and the City of London, are set for similar treatment, as are Toronto in Canada and Melbourne, Australia.
While municipal wireless networks that provide cheap internet access may seem an attractive prospect, they are not universally welcomed. Telecoms firms anxious to protect revenues from their existing wired broadband services are understandably hostile. More significantly, many independent analysts are saying there are flaws in the technologies and business methods underlying these schemes. City burghers, not always famed for their technological nous, are having the wool pulled over their eyes, the critics say, by allowing themselves to be locked into non-standard technologies that could quickly become outdated and whose long-term costs are unknown.
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鈥淭elecoms firms anxious to protect revenues from broadband are understandably hostile鈥�
The critique centres on the way that Wi-Fi systems, which work only within 100 metres or so of a hotspot antenna, are being combined into wider networks. Providing thousands of antennas with their own connection to a high-speed internet cable would be expensive. To keep costs down, the city-wide systems link a number of Wi-Fi hotspots to form a 鈥渕esh鈥�, in which radio signals received in one hotspot bounce from antenna to antenna until they find one that is connected to the net.
That would be fine except for one thing, says Ellen Daley, an analyst with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts: there are no standards for mesh systems. 鈥淲ithout a mesh standard, there is no interoperability between different systems,鈥� she says. The risk is that cities could become tied to a single vendor鈥檚 technology. The companies providing mesh systems are young, and the business model for municipal wireless is unproven, Daley points out. If the mesh company goes under, the network would probably be impossible to upgrade, and might even have to be written off completely.
Public Wi-Fi networks will also have an impact on Wi-Fi set-ups in homes, schools, libraries and coffee shops. To reduce the number of hotspots needed, some networks may be tempted to boost their power levels, potentially swamping domestic networks. In addition, there are frequency clash issues. All Wi-Fi installations have to be squeezed into three channels within a narrow band of 11 microwave frequencies, which they share with Bluetooth devices, DECT phones and microwave ovens. Neighbouring Wi-Fi hotspots must constantly hop between these channels to avoid interfering with each other, and the more they have to do this the slower each one runs.
Given these problems, just what is it that makes city governments so keen to embrace Wi-Fi? For some, like the City of Westminster in London, it offers roving employees wireless access to the systems back at base, allowing them to spend more of their working day on the road. Westminster has also introduced wireless closed-circuit TV cameras, which can quickly be relocated to crime hotspots when needed, says the city鈥檚 IT chief Simon Norbury.
The City of London Corporation, which governs London鈥檚 financial district, is planning to give its 350,000 workers, 7000 residents and their business visitors net access in streets and open spaces. As well as using laptops they will be able to connect via internet phones and the Wi-Fi-enabled Nintendo DS hand-held console, says Niall Murphy, technology chief at The Cloud, the company building the City Corporation鈥檚 network.
Philadelphia鈥檚 plan is even more ambitious. Derek Pew, acting chief executive officer for the Philadelphia Wireless project, says the aim is to provide 鈥渄igital inclusion for economically disadvantaged households鈥�, especially the one-third of the city鈥檚 1.4 million people who live below the poverty line. Around 40 per cent of Philadelphians have no internet access, and another 40 per cent only have dial-up. 鈥淲e have a very large digital divide here,鈥� Pew says.
Rather than risk public money on the project, Philadelphia has commissioned internet service provider Earthlink of Atlanta, Georgia, to build and operate the network. Earthlink hopes to make a profit on the $22 million it will cost to set up the network by selling subscriptions to households and businesses. Net access will cost $9.95 a month for low-paid families and $20 for other domestic subscribers. Free access will be available in 22 of the city鈥檚 major public spaces, including parks and squares.
Among the hoped-for benefits are allowing small businesses to sell goods and services online, and giving schoolkids access to online educational resources outside school. 鈥淭he city spends nothing and actually receives quite a bit back,鈥� Pew says. A similar 鈥減rivate sector pays鈥� model has been harnessed by the Taipei city government in Taiwan, whose Wi-Fly municipal wireless network is getting off the ground with a flat subscription rate of $12 a month.
鈥淚t would allow small businesses to sell goods online, and let kids use the net after school鈥�
Despite criticisms of unproven business models for the companies running municipal wireless, The Cloud in the UK seems to have hit on a promising system. It acts as what it calls a 鈥渘eutral host鈥�, providing a platform that any service provider can pay to use. The City of London network will carry services from a range of operators that includes O2, BT, Skype, Nintendo and Sprint. It is believed Philadelphia鈥檚 system will run on similar lines.
Municipal Wi-Fi in the US is facing significant opposition from major-league telecoms firms such as Verizon, BellSouth and Cox Communications, who are incensed that competing internet service providers are effectively being subsidised to provide rival internet services through access to publicly owned street furniture. They have successfully sponsored legislation in 12 states that makes it illegal for a city to set up a wireless network in competition with a local telco. 鈥淕overnment-owned wireless networks should operate by the same rules as other communications service providers,鈥� a BellSouth spokesman told New 杏吧原创.
Happily for Philadelphia, its plans are already so far advanced that they were exempted from Pennsylvania鈥檚 legislation. The laws are, however, holding up recovery in New Orleans, which had planned to offer free Wi-Fi in a bid to accelerate regeneration. 鈥淭he protectionist legislation now enacted at the state level specifically prevents cities from giving away Wi-Fi at speeds any greater than 124 kilobits per second, which is obviously useless,鈥� says Greg Meffert, technology spokesman for the city. He thinks something like The Cloud鈥檚 neutral hosting scheme 鈥渃ould be a unique potential solution鈥� for New Orleans.
The danger that cities could be locked into a proprietary mesh network should vanish in 2008, when a mesh networking standard called IEEE 802.11s is due to be ready. Alternatively, cities could do without Wi-Fi altogether and instead use WiMAX, a system for wireless internet access for which an IEEE standard already exists, and which has a range of 2 kilometres from each antenna.
New standards will come too late for Philadelphia, but Pew is unconcerned by suggestions that it risks being locked into outdated technology. He expects the city to be satisfied with the performance of existing systems for the foreseeable future. 鈥淭he point is to do the best we can to bridge the digital divide,鈥� he says. 鈥淎 schoolchild who goes home to internet access does better than a child who doesn鈥檛. Simple.鈥�
