Silicon Valley Power, the muni electric utilty owned by Santa Clara is preparing to launch a citywide Wi-Fi network later this year according to the Santa Clara Weekly. The city took over the failed MetroFi attempt at citywide wireless broadband and has apparently expanded it.
That system never reached the entire city and was limited to outdoor use. Santa Clara FreeWiFi will work citywide, indoors as well as outdoors. A new, high-density design will provide up to 40 access points per square mile - compared with less than 30 access points for the MetroFi system.
I share Esme Vos' reaction regarding its likely difficulties in actually functioning inside but the Santa Clara Free Wifi website strongly recommends that anyone who is planning to use it inside use a Wi-Fi- booster, which can be found at most tech stores.
Silicon Valley Power, as we previously noted, has an extensive fiber-optic system that is already uses for its power management. That will provide the necessary backhaul to the wireless access points.
This will undoubtedly be a nice amenity for those living or traveling in Santa Clara but it is unlikely to suffice for those who need reliable and high capacity connections to the Internet. It will be interesting to see who is ultimately paying for the Internet access charges as well as how the economics work out. The network will be helpful for remote meter readings -- perhaps the savings there will entirely pay for the public's usage of the network.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to meet some of the folks from the Personal Telco Project in Portland, Oregon. They have been around for a long time and do excellent work.
This is how they describe themselves:
The Personal Telco Project is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization located in Portland, Oregon dedicated to the idea that people have a central role in how their networks are operated. We do that by building our own networks that we share with our communities, and by helping to educate others in how they can too. To date, we have done this using Wi-Fi technology. We began in 2000 by turning our own houses and apartments into wireless hotspots (or "nodes"), and then set about building networks in public locations such as parks and coffee shops. There are currently about 100 active nodes participating in our project. We would like to see people and businesses in every corner and on every block of the city participating.
They have been involved in the discussion in Portland over how the City can ensure all residents and businesses have access to affordable, reliable, and fast connections to the Internet.
I was just reminded of them by a video that discusses their work and some of the reasons communities need to build their own networks (below). They also have a YouTube channel with more videos about community broadband.
A story from Washington, DC, seems appropriate for Thanksgiving. DC's Community of Hope provides healthcare and housing to people in difficult situations. It needs Internet access for its medical work but also for computer labs where people can search for jobs and students can do homework. DC-Net is now providing their access:
“Internet service has been a critical requirement for our programs for some time,” said Victoria Roberts, Community of Hope’s Deputy Director. “Through DC-CAN we are now able to get seven times more bandwidth for the same cost we previously paid, and the fiber network ensures that connection is truly reliable, which has been challenging in the neighborhoods we work in.”
DC-Net is going beyond just providing access to their locations by setting up Wi-Fi access points for the neighborhood to use as well.
DC-Net was created as a muni-owned fiber-optic network connecting schools, muni buildings, and libraries but has gone on to connect some federal agencies. The network has proved incredibly reliable -- far beyond what was provided by the incumbent or other national carriers. And now it is finding ways of delivering services to the people who may need them the most but have the least ability to pay.
Bristol, Virginia, holds a unique place in the heart of community broadband advocates because it was the first muni broadband network to provide triple-play services over a full fiber-optic network (OptiNet). It is well known among NASCAR aficionados for the Bristol Motor Speedway as well. What I didn't know, prior to my visit to Bristol this week, is that it is also home to a music festival celebrating the community's important contributions to country music.
The second page of the Fall Newsletter from Bristol Virginia Utilities [pdf] discusses how BVU's OptiNet has built a Wi-Fi network downtown to offer free connectivity to festival-goers. But it doesn't end there - they also provided laptops and HDTV to those who wanted to hang out.
From the newsletter:
At the 2011 Bristol Rhythm & Roots Festival, BVU set up the “BVU Pavilion,” a temporary technology hotspot. The pavilion offered free WiFi Internet, public laptops, as well as high-definition televisions and seating to festival guests throughout the entire weekend.
In addition to the BVU Pavilion, housed in downtown Bristol VA, BVU also installed equipment to provide WiFi Internet access throughout the twin city’s downtown areas. The access was a huge plus for users of mobile devices such as smart phones. Users could download festival applications like artist schedules, stage maps and more.
“As our second year providing this service, we knew people would be looking for us again. This is simply a gift to our city,” explains Gail Childress of BVU. “We are avid supporters of making our community a great place to live and visit. This complimentary service is just one way that we can say ‘Welcome’ to our visitors and ‘Thank you’ to our full-time residents.”
“BVU has been great to work with,” says Leah Ross, Executive Director for Rhythm & Roots. “This allows our fans to check their email, log onto Facebook or Twitter, blog about the festival or just surf the Internet. It’s really a win-win for everyone.”
Rhythm & Roots guests who prefer to use their own laptops or devices found available space within the pavilion to sit and log on. If guests came without a computer, laptops were available for use within the facility.
BVU personnel staffed the facility all weekend to answer questions and keep things running smoothly.
BVU is proud to step up for this community ensuring that both locals and visitors receive the best service for the second year running.
Because BVU has wired the whole community with fiber-optics, offering Wi-Fi is much easier. A significant difficulty in blanketing areas with Wi-Fi is the backhaul that takes the wireless traffic back to the central office and then out to the greater Internet. With fiber everywhere, the backhaul problem is solved.
Riverside, California, an innovative city of 300,000 in the eastern part of Los Angeles has been a broadband pioneer even though it sits in the shadow of tech centers like nearby Santa Barbara. Riverside’s accomplishment as a city catching up with the information age was evident when it was selected as one of the top 7 Intelligent Communities Award in 2011 by New York-based Intelligent Community Forum.
“It’s an honor to be selected as one of the top 7 cities in the world. It comes down to a couple factors, what communities are doing with broadband, but... includes digital inclusion, innovation, knowledge workforce (of folks within your community) and marketing advocacy... We rank very high in all those categories.” - City CIO Steve Reneker [Gigabit Nation Radio]
The cornerstone the city’s SmartRiverside initiative is a free public wireless network which covers 78% of the city’s 86 square miles. Established in 2007 by AT&T (which also offers DSL services in Riverside), the maximum speed of the network is 768kbps, which at just under 1Mbps is decent enough to surf the web and check emails. However the road to providing free Internet access and bridging the digital divide wasn’t so easy for Riverside.
The City issued a RFP in 2006 for a provider to deploy a citywide Wi-Fi network, with the goal of making the Internet accessible to users who can’t afford higher cost plans. The City met with respondents and a speed of 512kbps or about half a megabit was initially quoted as an entry-level speed that would complement existing services rather than compete against them. The contract was awarded to AT&T who hired MetroFi to build the network and charge the city a service cost of about $500,000 a year. MetroFi went bankrupt after completing only 25 square miles and Nokia Siemens took over but only completed up to the present level of coverage.
In 2007, the wifi network launched and began bridging the digital divide. Through the City’s digital inclusion efforts, not only were modest-income families able to obtain low cost or free PCs but also have means to use them with an Internet connection.
After AT&T acquired a competitor and created AT&T Wireless Systems (AWS), it informed the city in 2009 that it was going to off-load the network, transferring it back to Riverside at no cost. AT&T wanted out because it “didn’t sign up enough customers who would pay for premium service.” [Riverside takes over Wi-Fi network] Given that the contract stipulated the network could not be sold or leased to a private owner until after five years of operation, the City of Riverside’s only options were to find a new “sponsor,” pay for it, or shut it down. MuniWireless followed the events closely and revealed the community’s split between a quality public service they depend on and the willingness to pay for it:
The city council will vote on 16 March 2010 to maintain the network, find a sponsor, or shut it down. Some people in Riverside do not want the city to spend money on the network given the city’s precarious financial state, but others who have been enjoying the free Wi-Fi service, don’t want it taken away from them (see my article about St. Cloud, Florida whose city council ran into stiff opposition from residents over the termination of free Wi-Fi service). People who have been financially crushed and are trying to save money by using the free Wi-Fi service (and canceling their DSL/cable subscriptions) are urging Riverside to keep it up and running. This is exactly the same situation that the St. Cloud city council faces today. [Residents Oppose Closing of St. Cloud's CyberSpot Wi-Fi Network]
The Riverside City Council voted to end the AT&T contract and now owns the equipment. Time Warner is now the service provider and Minnetonka-based US Internet was selected to service and maintain the network. The new 5 year contract has the city paying $5.48 million, or a little over a million a year to US Internet. [US Internet takes over Riverside citywide Wi-Fi network] [Press Release]
In the future, Riverside hopes to build out the network to near full 100% coverage. It was rejected in both rounds of NTIA stimulus funds. In the first round, the city was not rural and did not lack resources to implement broadband. In the second round, it’s $8 milllion request for a middle mile intranet connection was rejected. However Riverside will benefit from indirect programs that did receive funds such as the California Emerging Technology Funds [CETF NTIA page] which does digital literacy. This bolsters the city’s existing digital inclusion and PC refurb programs for low-income families.
Silicon Valley Power, a muni electric in Santa Clara, was smart when fibering-up its electrical plant. They overbuilt their needs and are using the additional capacity to benefit the community. One of the biggest beneficiaries are the schools and taxpayers that support them.
That brought to mind my recent conversation with Larry Owens, manager of customer services at Silicon Valley Power. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based municipal electric utility built fiber between its subsystems to increase the organization’s reliability. But Silicon Valley Power overbuilt that network, which enables it to lease dark fiber to the school district and service providers via its SVP Fiber entity. The electric company also purchased MetroFi, a free Wi-Fi services company that fell on hard times, to connect new smart energy meters to its offices. Those Wi-Fi assets also are being leveraged to deliver free outdoor Wi-Fi access to anyone within Santa Clara.
I remember reading about this network earlier this year in a Public Power Daily release:
The technology and added bandwidth capacity allow teachers to hold virtual field trips and will eventually allow students who are unable to attend school the opportunity to join their classrooms via a home computer, Silicon Valley Power said. Download speeds have made classrooms more efficient, the utility said.
"Before the fiber network, the download process was very slow and sometimes wouldn't work at all when my class tried to use streaming video to add to our lessons," said Jennifer Rodriguez, who teaches a fourth- and fifth- grade combo class at Katherine Hughes Elementary School. "Now I can utilize instructional videos off the web and stream them quickly, making the lesson more interesting and the learning more fun for my students."
Santa Monica's approach to building community owned broadband that puts the community first has been wildly successful. They have not focused on providing residential connections, and likely will not in the future, focusing instead on meeting their municipal needs and businesses to spur economic development.
They can deliver up to 10Gbps to businesses that need it and they have connectivity throughout the City for whatever projects they choose to pursue. This includes free Wi-Fi in parks, controlling traffic signaling (prioritizing mass transit, for instance), and smart parking applications. On top of all that, their investments have saved more than a million dollars that would have been wasted on slower, less reliable connections provided by leased lines.
Arizona Avenue, the Mid-City area and the city's office district will all be getting makeovers if the City Council approves two contracts that will connect 40 signalized intersections to City Hall's centralized traffic control system.
The work represents the fourth phase in a five-phase effort to connect all of Santa Monica's intersections using fiber optic cables. Some signals will need to be fully replaced, while others can get by on smaller upgrades, according to the staff report.
Don't miss this hour long interview between Craig Settles and Jory Wolf, the brains behind Santa Monica's success.
Around 45 minutes into the interview, Jory Wolf talks about the ways the free Wi-Fi network promotes local businesses in partnership with a Buy Local campaign. I was thrilled to hear this as a colleague of mine at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance is a great friend of buy local campaigns because they are proven to help the small, independent businesses that contribute so much to communities.
If you want to learn more, particularly about how Santa Monica's approach has created many new jobs (that's right, smart public investments in broadband create jobs!) check out .
-Though the city provides Internet access directly, it also makes the network available to third-party providers on an open-access basis. “The incumbents have chosen not to use our assets,” Wolf says, explaining that larger providers are often reluctant to operate over networks where they cannot control the user experience and that their marketing and support organizations are not geared to using other companies’ networks.
However, other ISPs have shown interest in the network now that it is becoming successful. Currently, two ISPs offer services generally over the network, and other ISPs serve the Santa Monica offices of businesses that they deal with in other locations. Wolf says, “We have the opportunity to handle the business any way they prefer. … We’re not an obstacle; we’re an enabler. We don’t see ourselves as competitors, but as filling a void.”
City Net’s revenue from current business customers totals about $300,000 per year, enough to fund network operations and maintenance and to support an extensive system of free Wi-Fi hot spots throughout the city. Wi-Fi is now available at parks, beaches, libraries, public buildings and other open-space areas. On any given day, about 2,000 of Santa Monica’s 87,000 residents use the 27 Wi-Fi hot spots.
The city also has $190,000 of its capital funds remaining, which it uses as a revolving capital improvement project account. This account funds construction for network expansion, which is repaid by customers as the network is extended to their premises.
An indirect benefit of City Net is that it has forced competing networks to lower their prices. Wolf’s office estimates that nonparticipating providers have lowered their bandwidth prices by 20 percent or more, making bandwidth generally more affordable throughout the city. “If that’s all we had accomplished, we’d feel that we’d done what we intended,” Wolf says.
Finally, check out a recent segment of Santa Monica Update that discusses Santa Monica City Net (fast forward to 9:20 in the video to skip right to it).
Chattanooga, with the nation's most impressive broadband network (stretching into rural areas even outside the metro), is spending $30 million to put a Wi-Fi wireless network on top of it. At present, it is primarily for municipal uses:
For now, city government plans to retain exclusive use of the network for municipal agencies as it tests it with applications including Navy SEAL-esque head-mounted cameras that feed live video to police headquarters, traffic lights that can be automatically adjusted at rush hour, and even water contamination sensors that call home if there’s a problem beneath the surface of the Tennessee River.
Much of the wireless network is being funded by state and federal grants -- Chattanooga is turning itself into a test bed for the future city, at least for communities that recognize the benefits of owning their own infrastructure. Chattanooga can do what it wants to, it does not have to ask permission from Comcast or AT&T.
The goal for the city’s wireless network is to make the entire city more efficient and sustainable, said David Crockett, director of Chattanooga’s Office of Sustainability.
As Bernie Arnason notes at Telecompetitor, Wi-Fi is increasingly needed by smartphones because the big cellular networks cannot handle the load. The future has wireless components, but without Wi-Fi backhauled by fiber-optics, the future will be extremely slow and unreliable -- traffic jams for smartphones.
A more recent story from the Times Free Press notes that Chattanooga is wrestling with how to handle opening the network to residential and business use.
“I want to be innovative,” he said. “I want to do more than just turn it on in the parks.”
It’s a popular idea with technologists, tourism officials and the general public, who would gain the ability to surf around the city at speeds greater than typical cellular speeds.
Bob Doak, president and CEO of the Chattanooga Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, said allowing tourists to log onto the Internet via Wi-Fi “would be tremendous.
Unfortuately, state laws designed to "protect" some of the most powerful corporations in America, AT&T and Comcast, have limited the utility's options when it comes to offering services to the public.
The reason it’s a legal gray area, according to Tennessee state Sen. Bo Watson, is due to a legally “defined service area” that grants companies such as AT&T, Comcast and EPB specific regions and defines the capabilities they can offer.
Comcast and AT&T have proved incredibly powerful in the Tennessee Legislature, preventing any efforts to encourage more competition among broadband providers in the state by loosening restrictions on public entities to invest in their own networks. In the courts, where they have to argue on a level playing field with opponents (checking their unrivaled lobbying clout at the door), they have done much worse -- losing lawsuit after lawsuit intended to disrupt publicly owned networks.
All of us who want access to better broadband networks have to make sure our elected officials are voting for community needs, rather than for increased profits for Comcast and AT&T.
For those who want to learn more about the history of Chattanooga's incredible network, a good start is this interview with Craig Settles on Gigabit Nation.
With this wireless overlay, Chattanooga could have an incredible connected future - where anyone can get a great connection to the Internet anywhere in the city from a network that is designed top-to-bottom with the idea of maxmizing benefits to all -- businesses and residents alike.
One of the benefits of community ownership is the public should be more open to trying innovative strategies to maximize benefits from the network than a private corporation is because the corporation only cares to maximize profit. And the larger the corporation, the higher the tendency to avoid innovation to minimize any potential risk.
When the folks at KeyWifi developed an entrepreneurial approach to sharing Wi-Fi connections, they began approaching community networks as a natural partner. For those community fiber networks that don't want to build a wireless network on top of it, this could be a middle ground to get some of the benefits from such a network - particularly for small businesses that do not use their connections in the evening, as outlined toward the end of the TED talk below:
During the recent budget negotiations, one plan called for taking valuable wireless spectrum that is intended to be used as a commons and auctioning it off the massive corporations to monopolize. Rather than enabling a whole new generation of wireless technologies that would create countless jobs and ongoing opportunities for innovation (some have described it as Wi-Fi on steroids), it would have created a one-time cash infusion while further consolidating the incomparable market power of AT&T and Verizon. Preserving as much spectrum as possible as unlicensed commons allows communities, small businesses, and activists to build the wireless networks they need because they cannot afford to license spectrum for their sole use.
Wally Bowen wrote the following op-ed urging a more sensible approach. Fortunately, the spectrum auction was dropped from the plan - but it will undoubtedly come up again. This was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on July 31 and is reprinted here with permission.
U.S. House Republicans are pushing a proposal to sell off some of the nation's most valuable real estate as part of a debt-ceiling deal, apparently unaware of the harm it will do our economy.
This real estate is a portion of the public airwaves so valuable that it's been called the "Malibu beachfront" of the electromagnetic spectrum. This lower-frequency spectrum, previously reserved for broadcast radio and TV, is far superior to "Wi-Fi" frequencies used for Internet access - and for innovative devices ranging from microwave ovens and cordless phones to garage-door openers and baby monitors.
This prime spectrum can deliver broadband speeds that support high-definition video for telemedicine in rural and other underserved areas. This spectrum is especially plentiful in rural America, and could help connect millions of low-income citizens to affordable broadband services. It could also spark a new wave of high-tech innovation and job-creation far greater than the Wi-Fi boom of the last 25 years.
The genius behind the first wave of Wi-Fi innovation was unlicensed spectrum. Though these higher frequencies were once considered "junk bands" by radio engineers, designating them for unlicensed access gave innovators the freedom to experiment. It also gave investors incentive to take risks in launching new products.
Unfortunately, the GOP-backed plan would gut the huge market potential of this high-octane spectrum by selling it to the highest bidders: incumbent carriers more interested in shutting-out competition than in igniting the next great high-tech boom. Once auctioned, the spectrum would be licensed, creating enormous barriers-to-entry and disincentives for innovators, entrepreneurs and investors.
Oddly, House members pushing this auction plan - inappropriately called the "Spectrum Innovation Act" - acknowledge unlicensed spectrum's market advantage. But their mechanism for providing unlicensed spectrum is bizarre.
The bill would allow companies - and presumably the public - to place bids for this spectrum either as licensed or unlicensed. This never-before-tried auction would then pit the highest bid for licensed spectrum against the sum of all bids for unlicensed use. If the latter exceeds the former, the U.S. Treasury would reap the proceeds and the nation's economy would reap the rewards of the next unlicensed Wi-Fi boom.
But common sense should red-flag this auction scheme as unworkable. Even if companies and concerned citizens attempted to coordinate bids for unlicensed use, laws against collusion would have to be set aside. And why would smaller firms risk their money if they can assume larger firms like Google and Microsoft will do the heavy-lifting? Clearly, this proposed auction scheme is cover for a cynical spectrum-grab that would rob us and future generations of this prime electromagnetic real estate.
Let's hope lawmakers come to their senses quickly and dismiss the lobbyists pushing this self-serving scheme.
The amazing array of wireless devices developed over the past 25 years proves that unlicensed spectrum attracts investment, spurs innovation and unleashes the power of competitive markets. Unlicense this next-gen spectrum and let the innovators and job-creators get to work.
Public sector agencies are the nation’s largest telecom customers. A community with a population of 40,000 purchases an estimated $1.1 million dollars annually in telecom services – costs offset by use of I-Nets. Imagine the devastation on local budgets when state video franchising laws eliminate I-Nets as compensation for use of public right-of-way. It’s rumored that a cable operator can charge a California community $45,000 a month to use a thirty-drop I-Net that, prior to passage of the state video franchising law, had been part of payments for use of public rights-of-way.
