Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Supplement: Beyond Wires - Oct 31, 2002

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Nov 2002 13:31:36 -0500

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Beyond Wires

Local governments use wireless Internet zones to help connect constituents when the private sector won't.
By Shane Peterson, News Editor - November 2002

In late 2001, the mayor and leading officials of Jacksonville, Fla., trotted out the JaxWIZ — a wireless Internet zone covering the River Walk area by Jacksonville Landing in the city's downtown riverfront. Anyone with a mobile device that supports the 802.11b wireless protocol (Wi-Fi) can browse the Net wirelessly, and for free, in the JaxWIZ.

Over the last couple of years, the technology behind wireless Internet zones has matured, making it fairly simple and fairly cheap to whip one up. In New York, Seattle and San Francisco — to name a few cities — geeks armed with transmitters, antennas and a broadband connection to the Net have created miniWIZs that serve the neighborhoods in which they live.

Though popular, these efforts have not gone unnoticed by the telecommunications companies — Time Warner Cable of New York cracked down on approximately 10 of its customers in July, ordering them to cease sharing their broadband connection via the neighborhood WIZ. AT&T Broadband is also mulling such action, a spokeswoman told Business Week magazine.

Whether local governments could find themselves in similar hot water over their efforts to sponsor a WIZ in their community is unclear.

Expanding the WIZ

Jacksonville avoided any possible conflict with the telecommunications company in its area, BellSouth, because the city worked in partnership with the company.

"We did our WIZ pilot in the Jacksonville Landing with some of these companies as a public-private partnership," said Sandy Bateh, CIO of Jacksonville. "We've since expanded the pilot and have created a WIZ in three community centers. We did it with the Urban League as well as a telecommunications carrier [BellSouth] and a couple of private companies that have jumped on the bandwagon."

The WIZ extends anywhere from a half mile to a mile radius around the individual community centers, Bateh said, noting that officials targeted lower-income neighborhoods for the pilot tests.

The private-sector partners are donating the necessary infrastructure and PCs to eligible families in the areas surrounding the community centers.

The hardware is an equally important part of the equation, because connectivity doesn't help a family much if there's no computer at home, Bateh said. Getting PCs into families' homes is just as important as getting broadband access to neighborhoods.

In the future, WIZ projects may offer services to users for a small fee so that costs of the zones can be recouped, Bateh said.

In theory, a local government could go it alone by purchasing high-speed access for a community center, the necessary Wi-Fi equipment and simply making the Wi-Fi access point available to residents around a community center who lived within range of the signal.

But a local government could find itself in trouble if it pursues that course of action.

"If we knew that was, in fact, the case, we would challenge the city on that," said Michael Stewart, regional manager of corporate and external affairs of BellSouth. "I don't think the city would do anything illegal, and that [course of action] would require establishing themselves as either an ISP or a telecommunications provider, and they would have to be registered with the Florida Public Service Commission [PSC]. Short of that, we probably wouldn't know about it, and if we got word of it, we would report it to the Florida PSC."

It's Cloudy in Athens

Athens, Ga., is also working on a WIZ of its own, though in a slightly different flavor than Jacksonville's.

The Wireless Athens Group (WAG) is working with the city to create a wireless "cloud" — what they're calling a WAG zone — that would, ultimately, cover the downtown area, providing wireless Net access to any device with a Wi-Fi card.

WAG and the WAG zone are initiatives of the University of Georgia's New Media Institute. The city's role is fairly limited: It's a member of the WAG and is providing 10 light poles on which WAG's equipment will be mounted, as well as the electricity to power the equipment.

The city and the WAG are working under a one-year agreement, said Jeff Montgomery, a spokesman of the city's public information office. The actual Internet service is going through the university's New Media Institute, and the institute will also administer the access and content, he said.

The city has two companies providing broadband services, BellSouth and Charter Communications, and Athens officials aren't worried about attracting any undue attention from the telecommunications companies.

"To be honest, it's such a small area downtown — 24 blocks — none of us have anticipated having any issue with any of the broadband providers here from a theft-of-service perspective," Montgomery said.

The city isn't exactly sure what it expects to get from the partnership because the pilot is so new (at press time, only three blocks were covered by the cloud).

"I think for everybody, it's experimentation — sort of 'Let's see what we can offer,'" he said. "It's an opportunity to see what sort of benefits might result from something like this."

From the outset, part of the WAG's goal in creating the cloud was to stimulate the deployment of wireless services in the area, said Scott Shamp, director of the New Media Institute, and WAG took pains to make sure its actions wouldn't be construed as hostile to the rollout of wireless services.

"We'd be working at cross purposes if we developed a WAG zone, but it made our area less attractive to a wireless ISP to come in," Shamp said. "The way that we resolved that is that we have restricted our development of the WAG zone to being outside in the public thoroughfares of downtown Athens."

Though a resident of downtown could possibly use the WAG zone for his or her Internet service and avoid paying an ISP, that person's PC would have to be located right next to a window that faced the street — and the window couldn't be obstructed by a tree, Shamp said.

The WAG zone's ultimate purpose is to provide students of the New Media Institute with a ready-made testing area to test wireless applications they've designed in the classroom, he said.

"This is a research test bed," he said. "That's what it's good for, more than anything else — a place for students and faculty to experiment with developing wireless content. That's why we're in this game. It's not about allowing people to check their e-mail outside while they're drinking coffee; it's about helping students figure out what can be done with wireless technologies and what people are interested in experiencing via wireless technologies. It's not technology that's keeping people from using wireless; what's missing is compelling applications and compelling content that would encourage people to adopt this technology."

Shane Peterson, News Editor

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