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.