Subject: [NEXTEL-1] NYTimes - "Walker in the Wireless City"

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Nov 2002 01:50:35 -0500

-------- Original Message -------
From: Anthony Townsend <[email-masked]>
Subject: NYTimes - "Walker in the Wireless City"

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/nyregion/24FEAT.html

Walker in the Wireless City

November 24, 2002
By TOM VANDERBILT

IT is a late autumn day in Bryant Park. Red and yellow
leaves swirl around clusters of green folding chairs.
People sit in the thin afternoon light, talking on
cellphones, to others, to themselves. The scent of a
piquant cigar mixes with the crisp tang of fall.

As I sit in this verdantly genteel place, a whole other
flurry of movement and social interaction is going on
around me, one invisible to the eye. I watch it on my
laptop, the modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart in a
wheelchair, binoculars in hand, in "Rear Window." In the
small browser window of my iBook's Airport card, an antenna
of sorts, I find myself at the nexus of any number of the
wireless networks that have come to blanket the city.

There is one called "theorywireless1," another that says
"Wlan," another labeled "www.nycwireless.net" and one
called simply "X." I select the penultimate choice and
within seconds have a free broadband connection to the
Internet, something, it is estimated, found in less than 10
percent of American homes.

While most people were not watching, New York has become
host to yet another layer of infrastructure, a random,
interlinking constellation of what are called "wireless
access points." A survey last summer found more than 12,000
access points bristling throughout Manhattan alone, many
open to anyone with a wireless card, many others closed and
private, and still others available for a fee.

None of these were laid down by city workers. No streets
were torn up. No laws were passed. Rather, this network has
been made possible by the proliferation of ever more
affordable wireless routers and networking devices, which
in turn transmit the low-range, unlicensed spectrum (a wild
frontier, home also to baby monitors and cordless phones)
known as 802.11b, or, more genially, Wi-Fi.

Walking the streets of New York today means walking amid an
unseen tangle of Wi-Fi. The hum of Internet traffic mingles
with the jostle of pedestrians. Data "packets" whiz by like
bike messengers. In no place are the emerging social and
urban aspects of this fact made clearer than Bryant Park,
which last spring became what its operations director,
Jerome Barth, calls "the first park to have installed a
dedicated system that provides coverage throughout its
entire footprint."

Not that you would notice. A thin antenna rising from the
park's office serves as access point, while two similar
antennas, on top of the bathrooms and the pizzeria near the
Avenue of the Americas, function as what are called
repeaters. These minor appurtenances drape the eight-acre
park in high-speed Internet access.

The people who run the park now report that daily users of
its high-speed access number in the high two figures. Come
spring, they expect the daily figure to swell to several
hundred. Internet sessions often last more than an hour.

"We are intent on loading the park with users and
increasing what we call their `dwell time,' or how long
they stay in the park," said Daniel A. Biederman, president
of the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation.

The idea of Internet access surfaced at one of the
corporation's regular meetings more than a year ago, Mr.
Biederman recalled: "What can we do to make people stay in
the park? Why do they have to go back to their offices at
2? They have to go back to get on the Web. Why don't we
give them the Web?"

The idea of fixed connections seemed discordant with the
park's philosophy. "They were in portions of the park that
didn't seem amenable enough, too noisy," Mr. Biederman
said. "We wanted to have the same thing as we have with our
seating: a random distribution of the function."

Enter NYC Wireless, an ad hoc group committed to the
creation of free wireless access in public spaces
throughout the city. Bryant Park would be the perfect
showcase for their vision.

With some clever engineering and hardware from Cisco
Systems and Intel, the wireless park was born. Just as park
users could sit wherever they liked, so too could they gain
access where they liked. The eight-megabytes-per-second
connection was as free as the sunshine and the green grass.

"When we first started the group, we were concerned about
the proliferation of paid hot spots in coffee shops, hotels
and airports," said Anthony Townsend, a co-founder of NYC
Wireless, using the popular term for a wireless access
point. "We realized that if we could deploy a free hot spot
at a given location, there would be no incentive for a
commercial provider to ever set up a network there. People
are always going to choose the lowest-cost option."

The group began small. The other co-founder, Terry Schmidt,
set up a free network in the New World coffee shop
downstairs from his Upper West Side apartment. But with
Bryant Park as its flagship effort, and Madison Square and
Tompkins Square Parks among its other areas of coverage,
the group is building a loose network of free Wi-Fi
throughout the city. Apart from its centralized efforts,
the group's Web site is filled with announcements from
those who have set up their own access points, a
do-it-yourself response to the paid Wi-Fi found at
Starbucks.

Rather than a paid telecommunications service, its founders
regard wireless as an urban amenity with untold
implications for a city's vibrancy. "Cities wouldn't work
if we didn't have networks," Mr. Townsend said, "for moving
people, goods, information."

"This technology flies in the face of all the `death of
distance' and `end of geography' rhetoric of the 90's fiber
optic boom," added Mr. Townsend, a doctoral student in
urban planning at M.I.T. and a researcher at the Taub Urban
Research Center of New York University. For regulatory
reasons, the ranges of Wi-Fi transmitters tend to be within
several hundred feet.

"It's a very intimate technology, very local," he said. And
perfect for New York: the denser the city, the greater the
number of people who can gain access to a network. "It's
easier to achieve a critical mass. When we got to 50 hot
spots, that looked like a lot more than Los Angeles or
Atlanta. You could actually walk between them."

Rather than the death of place, it serves to reinforce
place. "Places that have it will become special," he said.
This in effect causes a kind of reimagining of the city's
geography - i.e., where can I go to find a hot spot? -
although interestingly, places with access already tend to
be vital urban places.

BRYANT Park is an example of what the geographer Kevin
Lynch, in his classic 1960 book "The Image of the City,"
called a node. Nodes, as he defined them, "may be primary
junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing
or convergence of paths, moments of shift from one
structure to another." They help give "legibility" to the
city, help us to orient ourselves. Node is also a word
synonymous with hot spot - a junction of Wi-Fi signals -
and the electronic nodes are turning up in the same parks,
airports and public gathering places that Mr. Lynch
considered physical nodes.

For Mr. Townsend, there is much possibility, and still much
to be learned, in the relationship between the physical
Bryant Park and its virtual twin. For example, should there
be some physical manifestation of the Internet activity in
the park, like a light that grows brighter with more users?
Should information about park events, dining options and
other local information be posted on the Bryant Park
portal?

Conversely, should the virtual park reflect the real one?
"When the park closes, do we close the network down?" he
asked.

Plans are in the works for a Bryant Park chat system, where
users could meet online. This location-based service, as
with other virtual meet-and-greet applications, represents
a striking effort to overcome the social distancing augured
by wireless itself: Why talk to the person next to you when
you've got the world at your fingertips?

For Mr. Biederman, the wireless program is part of the
evolving mission of Bryant Park, one of the world's most
heavily trafficked (900 people per acre) and intensely
managed public spaces. The park has kept track of its
Internet users with the same vigor with which it sends two
employees with clickers (one for men, one for women; a
close male-female ratio is vital to its vision of a vibrant
public place) to measure park attendance each day at the
peak hour of 1:15 p.m. On daily walkthroughs, the park
managers approach laptop users.

"We look over their shoulders a lot," Mr. Biederman said.
"When I see someone using a laptop and I run up to them and
say, `Hi, I'm the guy who runs the park, and I wanted to
see what your reaction is to this,' it's almost like
parental guidance."

That raises the issue of what is on people's screens at the
park.

"We want to give users the greatest privacy possible in the
usage of the system," Mr. Barth said. "We believe that just
as Bryant Park is a very lawful place where people are
extremely civilized, this will link in a manner to their
Internet usage; that you won't feel comfortable surfing the
Internet for reprehensible Web sites or pornography,
because the social pressure around you will make it an
unpleasant experience."

Call it "eyes on the net," an updated version of William H.
Whyte's classic idea of "eyes on the street," espoused in
books like "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" (1980).
Whyte, whose time-lapse studies of pedestrian behavior and
treatises on the desirability of movable chairs are the
foundation stones of Bryant Park's revival, died in 1999,
before the advent of the wireless park. And yet New York's
emerging wireless citizens, like the cellphone users before
them, would certainly have been germane to his studies of
street-corner conversations, plaza footpaths and spatial
relations.

Even if the Blackberry-armed New Yorker can check e-mail
anywhere, Whyte might have noted that this behavior had its
own distinct patterns, that people would feel more
comfortable doing so in inviting public places like Bryant
Park.

Whether or not Whyte would have envisioned the wireless
park, Mr. Biederman thinks it is true to his thinking.
"Anything that got people into parks, made them more
pleasant - he would have thought this was terrific," he
said.

DOWN the street from my house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn,
a Linksys wireless router sits in the window of the
apartment of Kevin Milani, a 28-year-old engineering school
dropout and marketing consultant. As one of the far-flung
band of people who have posted listings on the Web site of
NYC Wireless, he invites those within range to use the
bandwidth streaming into his house through a D.S.L. account
provided by Panix, a New York company. It is one of many
"stoop networks" to be found in Brooklyn.

"I have a lot of bandwidth I'm not using, so I might as
well share," he said.

This is the remarkable idea at the heart of the free
wireless movement. It's as if he invited people within 150
feet to watch whatever cable stations he happened not to be
watching at the moment.

Nor is he overly concerned with the risks of leaving his
electronic front door open. "A person could actually do
quite a bit of damage if they wanted," he said. "I have
backups. I am at risk just being connected to the
Internet." As for his potential redistribution of the
bandwidth provided by Panix, he said: "I don't think they
really care. They're a bunch of techies."

But Panix does care. For residential accounts, says the
company's president, Alexis Rosen, this is "strictly
prohibited." For business users, it is "strongly
discouraged." Predictably, large providers like Time Warner
also take a dim view of bandwidth sharers. "The fact that
the technology exists to go a couple of hundred feet is
irrelevant in our minds," said Joseph DiGeso, vice
president and general manager for high-speed online
services at Time Warner Cable of New York. "The ability to
tap into a phone line or cable box has existed for years,
but it doesn't make it legal."

A larger concern for Mr. Rosen is security. The spread of
broadband Internet has resulted in scores of connected
computers that are, in effect, servers unto themselves. Mr.
Rosen worries that such wireless arrangements are
vulnerable to hackers or "script kiddies," less technically
pro- ficient users who simply use code-breaking software.

"If you open your network to any fool who's got a wireless
card in their machine," Mr. Rosen said, "they can use your
machine to execute a bandwidth attack, or they can be the
victim of a script kiddie and be used to execute an attack.
And we can't even figure out who they are. We can only
trace it back to you."

The electronic city is still fairly porous, as was
demonstrated by a recent series of expeditions of the World
Wide War Drive. War driving means cruising through the city
logging unsecured access points. Christopher Blume, the
16-year-old New York coordinator of the war drive, trolls
through Manhattan like a Baedeker of the ether.

"You learn to look for the abbreviations as you're driving
by," he says. "Take `Bndemo.' You wouldn't think anything
of that. But where I drive by, that's Barnes & Noble."
(This summer, after the magazine 2600 published a log of
the bookseller's network activity, including credit card
numbers, the network was closed.)

Mr. Townsend of NYC Wireless concedes the additional
security risks of a public wireless network, but adds that
any network has its vulnerabilities. "I can sit here in my
office and sniff the traffic going over the local network,"
he said. As for al Qaeda or child pornographers using
Bryant Park, he argues that there is nothing anyone can do
on a wireless network that couldn't be done at the public
library.

With all their promise and peril, the emerging wireless
networks raise the perennial questions about the dynamics
and very nature of urban space. Can public life ever be
made truly safe? How do you balance private and public
space? What does the geographic distribution of the
wireless networks say about the socioeconomic makeup of a
city, especially one as large and complex as New York?

Quite a lot, as Marcos Lara, founder of the Public Internet
Project, found out this summer. He and a research team,
using a global positioning system, a laptop and an antenna,
conducted a four-month survey of all wireless access points
in Manhattan (www.publicinternetproject.org). Mr. Lara, 28,
formerly of NYC Wireless and part of the Bryant Park
initiative, is now working to bring broadband access into
underserved communities. He also sells the results of his
findings, correlated in a plotted, thematic map that, as he
puts it, represents a "one-of-a-kind look into the use of
wireless technologies in daily consumer life."

His drive also cast cold digital light on the notion of
urban social disparity.

"It's one thing to hear about it," he said. "It's another
thing to actually see it occurring on your screen as you
drive down the block. You see the economically depressed
areas. You think: `Well, maybe they have computers. Maybe
they have technology.' Then you look down on the screen,
and you have this unique portal into their world, and it's
a desert."

Tom Vanderbilt is author of "Survival City: Adventures
Among the Ruins of Atomic America."

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