[Rooftops] Re: [msgs] City of Boston WI-FI "summit" Thurs @ Museum of Science (9am - 1pm) (fwd)

[Stephen Ronan]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Trevor Schroeder wrote:

>  - Providing network access is only one part of the question.  Access to
>    computers is obviously just important.

Have you had a chance yet to read the Philadelphia business plan 
and RFP? If so, what did you think of those? They include 
provisions for donation of 10,000 computers in low-income 
communities, each with 8-10 hours of training. But my sense was 
that that might not happen until a few years hence and presumably 
only would happen to that degree if other parts of the business 
plan were successful in meeting goals for subscribership.

>
>  - Panelists kept talking over and over about how we need to have
>    symmetric channels to allow people to be content creators and
>    publishers as if that were the sole barrier.  For these folks the
>    desire to create and disseminate is so strong that they don't realize
>    that others need motivation to understand *why* or that they even
>    *can* create stuff.  People find $300 for game consoles, that money
>    could just as easily buy a computer, but why choose one over the
>    other?  If people are given access without support in using it to its
>    fullest potential, it will simply become a carrier for Xbox Live or
>    Launch.com.  The trend towards commercialization/consumerization of
>    Internet access has been towards asymmetric delivery because most
>    people aren't content creators.  We need to change this, but just
>    giving a symmetric channel doesn't do it.

I'm pretty sure that folks like Richard O'Bryant, Russell Newman, 
Michael Oh, Jock Gill, and Nyvia Colon are well aware of these 
issues. At the same time, most or all of them realize that it 
will be very difficult to overbuild the highly asymmetric Comcast 
and Verizon FIOS networks with higher capacity symmetric wired 
infrastructure and the deficiencies of those networks' 
orientation towards one-way provision of video services needs to 
be highlighted in policy discussions now, at a time when the FCC 
as a whole, and many legislators, have paid the issue little 
constructive attention.

It may otherwise be the city's position that currying favor with 
Verizon in order to hasten in Boston an asymmetric Fios 
deployment with highly restrictive terms of service forbidding 
WiFi sharing or personal servers, is the city's best strategy to 
benefit citizens' access to broadband at a time when the company 
is cherry-picking other higher income communities. Perhaps that 
would indeed make sense, but a strong argument might be made that 
the city would instead be better off in the long run by 
developing its own content neutral, open architecture fiber 
infrastructure, or one under local nonprofit control, that could 
be leased to ISPs in a manner akin to the Philadelphia wireless 
plan.

>  - The panelists had their Wi-Fi blinders on.  Some made nods towards UWB
>    and software radio, but ultimately the focus was far too narrow.  The
>    beauty of Wi-Fi is its low equipment and marginal costs.  If you just
>    need a small standalone network or to add wireless to an existing
>    wired-infrastructure, it's CHEAP.  That's great.  It makes it very
>    easy for existing institutions (the so-called MUSHes) and technical
>    individuals to provide free or possibly low-cost access should they
>    desire.  (There's the classic study that shows billing makes it way
>    more expensive than just giving it away.)
>
>    But when talking about universal coverage, it's a completely different
>    question.  Wi-Fi is not the dominant wireless standard, cellular is.
>    There are data cellular offerings already and they have far better
>    coverage than any unified wi-fi network today.  If you build a unified
>    wi-fi network, you have all the problems that cellular companies have:
>    wide-area infrastructure, towers, redundancy, billing, etc.
>    Basically, the cost of the AP is only a small piece of the pie and
>    that becomes the only difference between you and a cellular operator
>    when looking at a full city-scale wi-fi deployment on purpose-built
>    infrastructure.

In addition to the Philly RFP, you may find it of interest to 
look at Tropos Networks (http://www.tropos.com/) if you haven't 
yet and rather than think in terms of a cellular type 
architecture consider the viability of the Tropos style mesh 
architecture relying mostly on access points connected to 
lightposts. The plan in Philly is to use 18 to 30 of them per 
square mile and Philly covers about 135 square miles while Boston 
is only 50 square miles. So that'd only be about 1250 needed to 
reach pretty much every building in Boston. And for connecting 
some of the nodes to the backbone, perhaps using pre-WiMax 
equipment, one wouldn't need cell towers what with the scattering 
of tall buildings that pop out here and there in the Boston 
skyline.

They did a one-square mile test in Philly and at least portions 
of pretty much all buildings (i.e., the first couple of floors in 
the front) could get a fast reliable signal using their test 
client equipment, which was a Hawking USB client adapter. From 
the parts of buildings that were well-covered one might 
presumably create a small local mesh or bridge onto the interior 
electrical power lines to extend to other parts of the building.

And that's with 802.11b or g. It seems that 802.11n will 
dramatically increase range. And pre-n equipment is already on 
the market...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1668063,00.asp 
I'd be curious to know how soon a company like Tropos would move 
to its use. Shouldn't be very long, should it...? though a little 
longer than may have been hoped:
http://www.techworld.com/mobility/news/index.cfm?NewsID=3697

>    If you want full-scale wireless coverage, it seems best to work with
>    the players who already have the infrastructure to support it.  Do you
>    think you can go head-to-head against Verizon?  All they have to do is
>    add access points to their existing stations and they can even offer
>    wi-fi.  Those carriers are geared up to offer coverage if it can be
>    shown to be economically feasible on the scales at which they operate.

When one thinks of streetlights, it's the city that is the player that has the 
infrastructure. And Verizon seems more than a little worried 
about trying to go head to head with cities.

Of late, Verizon's been heading in the other direction re: WiFi. 
A year ago they announced plans to put in 1000 hot spots at NYC 
phone booths to be available for use of their DSL subscribers. 
But by Novemeber they cut the number in half and a month later it 
appeared that the plan might be further cut.

And there's this:
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/02/09/rollout_by_verizon_triggers_concerns/


>    Given this, the best suggestion I heard was that the City should focus
>    on facilitating individual or private efforts, giving access to
>    utility poles, facilitating interoperation, etc. and stay out of the
>    ISP biz themselves.

The happenstance development of Boston's street infrastructure 
(based on the meandering of cattle?) creates considerable charm, 
I think, as a pedestrian. But I can understand how a truck driver 
might be less enthused. And doubt there's advantage to an 
uncoordinated approach in regard to WiFi. Is it better to try to 
facilitate, or instead to mandate, interoperability if the city's 
infrastructure is to be a vital part of the system? And aren't 
there good efficiencies derived from aggregating demand 
throughout the city in regard to matters such as cost of 
backhaul? And won't all for profit operators tend to ignore lower 
income areas except those that are highly concentrated in 
population? What, if anything, might you find disagreeable, 
Trevor, in regard to the Philadelphia plan, which has a single 
nonprofit oversee a coordinated citywide buildout with a central 
goal of equitable access, and then leases access to perhaps half 
a dozen ISPs with the city neither being directly responsible for 
implementing the buildout nor for the ongoing ISP services?

>    This will allow wi-fi to flourish where it works
>    best: at the low-cost margins where large-scale providers have a hard
>    time turning a profit.  This doesn't resolve the "digital divide" (I
>    hate that term) question, but perhaps we need targeted solutions for
>    that.  The nice (?) thing is that low-income populations tend to be
>    pretty geographically defined, so if the City finds that those areas
>    are falling behind in wireless access (as they are already), it could
>    provide service (either directly or through a grant or contract to
>    another provider) to those specific areas without getting into the
>    mess that is full city-scale service provision.  The Boston Main
>    Streets wireless initiative is actually a good example of this.
>
>    If these providers want to link up and charge through a common billing
>    system, that's fine, the City just needs to stay out of the way.
> 
> So why didn't I say this all yesterday?  Frankly, I was too disappointed.
> It seemed pretty clear that the folks up on the stage had very different
> agenda and I felt like what I had to say didn't even figure into their
> vision.  So let them have it, but I think they're far wide of mark.

I'm not that clear yet how the agenda of the folks on stage 
differed from yours. In fact the BRA chap seemed to explicitly 
favor a relatively laissez faire approach by the city, with it 
perhaps facilitating this and that here and there but offering 
little leadership and direction. And most other speakers seemed 
optimisitc about a collaborative process involving hospitals, 
universities, and private sector, with lightly facilitated 
organic growth... They seemed to lean more toward the Cleveland 
http://www.muniwireless.com/archives/000209.html than toward the 
Philadelphia http://www.phila.gov/wireless approach.

But that article about Cleveland was written a year ago. And 
nothing much has happened since then in Cleveland in regard to 
WiFi, or so I'm told by a knowledgeable Clevelander who describes 
much of the plans for collaboration there to be "vaporware". And, 
by contrast, it seems that in Philadelphia there's substantial 
and steady progress thanks to major initiative and direction 
from the City.

   - Steve