Tag: wifi

Free wireless for New Orleans!

Post ImageIt appears that New Orleans will be the next city to implement free, city-wide wireless Internet access. Yes, that New Orleans, the one that was completely submerged in water a few months ago courtesy Hurricane Katrina. Seems that the devastation of the city is what brought on the free WiFi:

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has announced an unprecedented project wherein the entire city will be blanketed by free WiFi within a year. Due to the almost complete devastation of the city’s infrastructure, the free Internet access is one attempt to turn the city’s stagnant economy into one of growth and independence. Like in most large-scale networks, the New Orleans routers will be placed on top of street lights and provide citizens and businesses with 512 kbps download speeds until the city’s state of emergency has been lifted.

I think it’s sad that it takes the destruction of a city to get something like this off the ground, but I think New Orleans will be much better off for it in the long run. And yes there are probably a lot of other projects that require funding and effort to rebuild the city, but I think it’s good the people in charge there are looking beyond just “rebuilding”.

Read: Engadget

Wireless Cities

Post ImageTime for an update on wireless everywhere! Unfortunately Edmonton isn’t much closer to being covered in wonderful wireless Internet access, but many other cities are. What was once a side project in a few townships has become a big deal for some major locales:

Vendors that build and manage wireless networks report unprecedented municipal interest over the last couple of years, with requests for proposals streaming out of city halls everywhere.

“Overall, I’d say it’s very active,” said Lee Tsao, director of the global solutions group for Pronto Networks, a wireless provisioning company in Pleasanton, California. “In the last four months, we’ve signed up about 10 cities.” Todd Myers, founder and vice president of corporate development for AirPath Wireless, a provisioning firm based in Waltham, Massachusetts, put it more simply: “We’re swamped. There are just so many RFPs out now.”

Some of the newer technology like WiMax has been slow out of the gate, so most of the cities pursuing wireless networks are building so-called “mesh networks”, which essentially consist of daisy-chained Wi-Fi antennas. Apparently it’s pretty cost effective.

Wireless networks in cities show no sign of slowing down either:

In late September, research firm MuniWireless.com forecast that U.S. cities and counties will spend nearly $700 million over the next three years to build municipal wireless broadband networks.

Municipal wireless has also finally received support from politicians and lawmakers, notably FTC member Jon Leibowitz who “enorsed the concept of municipal broadband networks, comparing them to public schools and libraries.” (For a PDF of his endorsement, click here.)

Bring on the wireless cities!

Read: Wired

More on Google Wifi

Post ImageI am sure we’ll continue to see lots of news emerge about Google and the plan to offer free wireless access to all of San Francisco, but this Reuters story already caught my eye:

San Francisco has received more than 24 separate proposals to provide free, wireless Internet services citywide from vendors including Web search company Google Inc., the city’s mayor said on Monday.

Chris Vein, director of telecommunication and information services for the City of San Francisco, said the proposals involved a range of different free or low-cost business models. Only one company Vein declined to name had proposed an advertising supported plan for free wireless access, he said.

That company appeared to be Google. A Google spokesman on Friday had confirmed that its Wi-Fi access proposal could be funded through online advertising.

That would certainly make sense wouldn’t it? Not rocket science or anything. I am not sure what I’d think of ad-supported wireless. I am sure if I had to choose between paying a monthly fee or putting up with some advertising, I’d take the advertising, though I wonder how they would implement it.

Read: Reuters

Google Wifi in San Francisco

Post ImageIt seems that Google has officially submitted a bid to the city of San Francisco to build a city-wide free wireless Internet service. Om Malik broke the story late yesterday, noting:

Google officials say San Francisco residents (and visitors) will enjoy a free 300 kilobits per second, always on connection anywhere in the city. As part of its proposal, the company says it will be offering wholesale access to other service providers, who will offer higher throughput connections to their customers. Google says it plans to use its own authentication services. (That explains the Google WiFi VPN client to some extent). The company is going to use San Diego-based WFI, a cellular network builder company to build out the WiFi network.

There have been rumblings about this for weeks, and people claim to have discovered test networks in other cities too. So upon hearing the news, the first thing I thought was that Google is going to fulfill my vision of wireless everywhere by building free wifi networks in cities around the world! Not so, according to a New York Times article on the story published earlier today:

“Offering a free service like this is a great way to support the Bay Area,” said Chris Sacca, a new-business development executive at Google. “We don’t have any plans outside of the Bay Area.”

While that kind of sucks, I am not holding my breath. I am sure if they see any value in providing the service at all, they’d reconsider opening it to other cities too. And even if that doesn’t turn out to be the case, perhaps other companies will take a cue from Google and build their own networks.

Read: CNET News.com

Google Wifi

Post ImageThe latest “confirmed” Google rumor is the infamous “wifi service” that has long been predicted. Not entirely certain why Google would want to get into the wireless business, but who knows, it probably falls into The Master Plan somehow. From John Battelle:

In any case, I think folks really want to believe that Google is about to offer something totally game changing here, and honestly, it’s hard not to want to believe this – it fits exactly our collective expectations for the company. But there are so many dots to connect in this idea, that I find a massive, one step roll out hard to fathom. On the one hand, if Google does pull this off, it’d be a coup. On the other, maybe this is just a speculative test, and it’s teaching us the power of the the Google Rorshach effect in real time….

For now, all we’ve got is this page, which is basically just a bunch of “scratching the surface” questions. If it were really a FAQ page, it would have something like “Are you planning to use Wifi as a tool for taking over the world?” That’s what I want to know anyway.

Read: John Battelle

Always On Wireless

Post ImageWhat’s my mantra? Wireless Everywhere! I look forward to the day when wireless is like oxygen; everywhere you go, it’s there. So it always makes me smile when I find an article that really nails the vision:

“If you ask someone what the (return on investment) on plumbing is, they couldn’t tell you, because it’s just part of what the building needs to survive,” Ed Cantwell, president and CEO of InnerWireless says. “Wireless is like that. People can debate if wireless is a utility, but I contend that it already is just like heating and cooling, lights, plumbing and electricity.”

I think that’s an excellent step, treating wireless access like water and having buildings designed with that in mind. That’s what happened at the University of Chicago hospital:

The pediatric hospital’s new wireless infrastructure aggregates two-way radio, public-safety radio, paging, Wi-Fi and cellular networks into one system that runs throughout the building, augmenting signals with antennas spread around each of its six floors.

There’s a whole host of startups providing such infrastructure. If I were to build a building, you can bet that an integrated wireless utility would be part of the specifications.

Read: CNET News.com

Is using open Wi-Fi against the law?

Post ImageYou might have heard in the news recently that “wardriving”, or using someone’s open wireless connection from your car, is once again a hot topic. It seems that a man in Florida was arrested for “hacking” into an open network connection from his vehicle. Here’s what the folks an Engadget had to say:

If stories like this one result in more users setting up WEP (and, yes, we know it’s not very secure, but it’ll block “casual” intruders) on their machines, fine. If, however, every time we open a laptop in a public place (some of which, like New York’s City Hall Park, have public WiFi access), we’re tagged as a potential criminal, something truly valuable will have been lost.

I completely agree! The problem is that the law under which the man was charged was written before anyone had considered wireless network connections. Here’s what CNET found out about the topic:

Is it legal to use someone’s Wi-Fi connection to browse the Web if they haven’t put a password on it?
Nobody really knows. “It’s a totally open question in the law,” says Neal Katyal, a professor of criminal law at Georgetown University. “There are arguments on both sides.”

The law in question, of course, is in the United States. I am not sure if Canada has something similar, though I would be willing to bet that we do. I certainly hope the matter is resolved soon, because in two years I think it will be commonplace to have entire cities covered in wireless access – assuming that WiMax equipment is manufactured sometime in the near future.

Read: Wi-Fi Alliance

Philadelphia Wireless

Post ImagePhiladelphia is being called the “poster child of the municipal wireless movement” with their citywide Wi-Fi network scheduled to be operational by next summer. If we want to get anywhere close to my “wireless anywhere” mantra, experiments like Philadelphia’s are an absolute must. I am looking forward to hearing how well things work in the city:

“Setting up a citywide network is definitely not as easy as putting up access points all over the place,” said Doug Schremp, chief technology officer of BTS Partners, a consulting firm that designs and deploys networks. “There are some technical issues that need to be addressed, and cities really need to look at the operational and business issues that come with building and owning their own network.”

More importantly, there are fears of wireless interference which would result in very unreliable connections. Apparently in testing, Philadelphia did not find any problems related to interference. Boston on the other hand, has seen major problems (look at the number of universities and colleges in the area to see why). I think there probably needs to be more testing done.

Hopefully we’ll see more of these citywide roll-outs when WiMax becomes popular, as it should help to decrease the cost of not only setting up the network, but also maintaining it. And as more networks go up, the problems associated will become more clear, and can then be solved. In any case, the Philadelphia network is very promising!

Read: CNET News.com