Towns Hope Pa.-Style Laws Won’t Fence Off Their Wi-Fi Field of Dreams
SAN JOSE, Cal. -- The praises of citywide public Wi- Fi networks for residents and business were sung by officials from Corpus Christi, Tex., to Hermosa Beach, Cal., as well as vendors. But they spoke at the Wi-Fi Planet conference here late Wed. in the shadow of a Pa. law signed the night before that lets municipalities offer paid communications services only at the sufferance of local phone companies starting in 2006 (CD Dec 2 p4).
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Cities are in the best position to “really hold carriers’ feet to the fire” in speeding pervasive high- speed Internet service rollouts and cutting prices, said Esme Vos, who runs MuniWireless.com. The new Pa. law gives Verizon incentives to build out high-speed networks but they're inadequate, she said. To grease the skids for enactment, Verizon cut a last-minute deal to let Philadelphia proceed with its Wi-Fi network plans, but “Philadelphia isn’t the only community in Pennsylvania.”
Similar measures are pending in other states, Vos said, and “unless people wake up and figure [it] out and read and talk to their legislators, this thing is going to go through.” Major communications companies have every interest in pushing such legislation and they have legislators’ ears, she said, and major media have only this week presented the issue to others who may have a stake. But Hermosa Beach council member Michael Keegan said Democratic legislators had told him such a measure has no chance in Sacramento: “I think we're safe from a Philadelphia story.”
Municipal Wi-Fi networks offer economic development, including by attracting conventioneers; public safety benefits such as wireless camera surveillance; and bridging the digital divide, said CEO Carlos MacDonald of vendor CamSoft Data Systems. At the typical city hall, “economic development is all on board, but the IT people are all ‘We've never deployed these things.'” In L.A., for instance, “there are areas the telecoms will not serve” with fast Internet access, he said: “What’s the city to do?” Besides, in a poor area, “the prices need to be in the 20s, or in the teens really,” in monthly dollar subscription costs, and if a major provider does go in, it wants $45-$50, MacDonald said. “There’s a lot of federal grants out there” for construction, he noted. But inner- city municipal networks require follow-through to succeed: “You can’t just build them and get out. You have to get the community involved.” Once a city builds its own networks, telcos invariably want in, he said.
Hermosa Beach has 300-450 active users on a network that since Aug. has provided about 6 Mbps access, free, to 30% of the area of the town of 20,000 at a $35,000 start- up cost, Keegan said: “It’s an open freeway, and it’s not very crowded… We've gotten nothing but positive response from our residents so far.” The rest of the city is supposed to be built out at year-end or early 2005 and it seeks at least 3,000-4,000 users. The city sells $115 Wi- Fi user installation kits with hardware and instructions. It will run the network itself for a while and then see whether outsourcing management becomes advisable, he said.
Keegan’s philosophy is that Internet “content doesn’t cost anything, per se, and the access shouldn’t either.” He said he’s confounded that city residents pay for municipal communications networks for services such as police, firefighting and public works and don’t demand access for themselves. Keegan said he proselytized for this view at a Corpus Christi meeting of 80 municipal chief information officers. Such systems shouldn’t be “only for the benefit of the cops and the businesses,” he recalled saying. “It should be for the benefit of all in the city, not the few.” Keegan said he'll “continue to wave the banner of free municipal wireless.”
The Hermosa Beach network is meant to be self- supporting. Putting it up will cost about $10 per capita and maintenance should be covered by nonsubscription revenue, Keegan said. The system has a “forced” home page, Wifihermosabeach.com, on which the town has sold ads to 3 real estate brokers, he said. The city is bringing in a professional commissioned ad salesperson to attract paid classifieds at $200-$300 each that will mix with free ones and are hoped to generate $3,000-$4,000 monthly, he said. With affiliate commissions the town hopes to generate from users’ e-commerce purchases, it’s targeting $5,000-$7,000 total commercial revenue annually. Network use is free not only for public service reasons: The city has no billing system and installing one would cost $5-$7 a user monthly the first few years, which “would offset the benefit of collecting any money,” Keegan said.
The site draws new advertisers targeting much smaller markets than do newspapers, which are regional, he replied to a challenge from a San Jose Mercury News writer in the audience about taking revenue dollars from the pockets of commercial media. Hermosa Beach has a partnership in which the Daily Breeze newspaper puts news and its logo on the network home page, Keegan said. “Your firm is more than welcome to advertise on our site,” he told the journalist.
“If anybody’s here from Adelphia or Verizon, I don’t think they'll be contributing to my campaign next fall,” Keegan said. At a recent city council meeting that voted an approval for the network, an Adelphia lawyer said the system threatened company jobs and promised to sue, without specifying grounds, he said.
In Corpus Christi, the network stemmed from the city’s realization that a do-it-yourself system would be more economical for automated utility meter reading than cellular services would, said city business unit manager Leonard Scott. The biggest objection was security, addressed with a “layered solution,” he said -- use of encryption, secure sign-in, a firewall, a virtual private network, and to keep communications streams separate, a virtual local area network. The city is partly covered now, with full coverage of its 147 sq. mi. set for late summer 2005.
Benefits will be plentiful, Scott promised, including: (1) Monitoring the security of port shipments. Corpus Christi has jumped from 5th- to 3rd-largest U.S. port by tonnage, on the strength of Iraq war supplies including fuel. (2) Providing police and fire departments information sharing, automated location information and streaming video. (3) Allowing access to information on public-school students and taking broadband into homes that would never have it otherwise, through provision of student laptops in place of textbooks. (4) Slashing times on building inspection and permits. (5) Letting local merchants reach residents with information such as item pricing and in-stock positions, including through free mall Wi-Fi. (5) Attracting to town people who want to telecommute, and businesses.