Corpus Christi recently became one of the few local governments to complete a citywide Wi-Fi network, a feat numerous cities are trying to achieve.
Now is a fertile time for municipal wireless networks. No uniformly accepted set of best practices exists. Cities are copying what they like from governments further along in the process and formulating the rest based on what they can squeeze from their vendors.
Citywide Wi-Fi networks offer local governments moderately priced Internet access, usually faster than dial-up but slower than high-speed broadband. A government can turn the network into a revenue source by leasing bandwidth to vendors. It can also use it to power mobile applications that streamline government.
Virtually all governments that pursue a citywide Wi-Fi network include some effort to deliver connectivity to underprivileged citizens.
The investment depends on a local government's size. The larger it is the better chance it has at finding a vendor to build the network for free in hopes of cashing in on Internet service subscriptions.
"There are probably only a handful of cities, maybe 15 or 20 - what EarthLink calls the NFL cities - that are dense enough to justify the expense for a vendor," said Jeffrey King, spokesman for Northrop Grumman. "But the other places that aren't as dense still need and want the service across their total geography. For them, it's a situation where they're not going to find a private partner willing to put up that much capital for a relatively less opportunity to make a profit."
To build the network a vendor usually attaches wireless antennas to streetlights throughout the city.
Population density realities force smaller cities to find more creative ways to fund the network.
Local governments, which often subsist on tight budgets, typically resist funding Wi-Fi networks. Some cities form separate nonprofit organizations to collect corporate donations to cover their networks.
Many rural communities face economic doom without broadband access, but find ways around the absence of telecommunication and cable companies in their areas. Numerous rural towns utilize government grants to partner with local Internet service providers (ISPs) to deploy fixed wireless networks.
Many say the exodus of today's professionals from a traditional office environment is propelling the national shift toward citywide Internet connectivity. People want to work wherever they need or want to be. Naturally they expect those conditions wherever they travel, which means any city wanting to host conventions or tourists follows suit.
The Craze Hits Corpus Christi
Corpus Christi's City Council did the unusual and funded a Wi-Fi network deployment on the promise of an automated meter reading system for water and gas. Scott said Intel approached him and pitched a series of mobile applications the network could empower, which accelerated his deployment.The city selected Northrop Grumman to build the network to cover its full 147-square-mile geography.
"Once you put up a network like this, there's a lot of bandwidth - more than the city could possibly use for its internal purposes. Corpus Christi's government led the charge," King said. "They provided the capital expenditure to put the network in place and now have bandwidth they can lease to wireless telephone companies for voice over IP or to Internet service providers."
He said many cities consider subsidizing Internet service coverage to close the digital divide, but Corpus Christi opposed that.
"If the city gave it away for free, we saw two problems with that. One was that it would compete unfairly with local businesses," Scott said. "The second was
that the general taxpayer would be paying for something he may or may not be using. People who use it ought to be paying for it."
Scott said he had a difficult time persuading some City Council members to approve Corpus Christi entering the Wi-Fi business at all, without piling on subsidies. He said he preferred a network operation that meddled in the private market as little as possible.
"Now all the Internet service providers can market the bandwidth the way they want," Scott said.
The network offers local dial-up ISPs a unique business transition opportunity as the dial-up market evaporates, he said adding that those providers could sell Wi-Fi-based services from the bandwidth they lease on the city network for roughly the same costs of selling dial-up.
Scott said the city would likely charge ISPs roughly $10 a month per user.
"On their end, they can sell that from $20 to $25 dollars a month," he said, " and make a really good profit."
Those Wi-Fi-based providers would have little overhead because the network already exists, he said. There would be no network infrastructure costs. They would merely need to lease the bandwidth and create a customer support apparatus, said Scott.
Corpus Christi also uses the network to stimulate local business growth. The city is setting aside a certain amount of bandwidth so citizens can access certain Web sites on the network, whether or not they purchase wireless Internet services.
The Corpus Christi portal will offer that availability, as will an additional portal Scott is developing that local businesses can use to sell products online.
Scott and his team held discussions with several local businesses and learned that many of them purchased goods and services online that they could have bought over the counter from a local business.
"Over-the-counter businesses across the country have been losing more than 10 percent annually over the last three years," Scott said. "That was blamed on the economy originally. Now when we look at the overall sales, the economy does not reflect that. It's shifting from over-the-counter to Internet sales. We've got to take our over-the-counter sales folks and get them selling on the Internet so that our local money stays local."
Scott said he thinks the possibility of quick, local return policies will give Corpus Christi businesses an edge over distant online sellers. At the same time, he added that he hopes the online portal brings local businesses into an international market.
Typically cities that pursue Wi-Fi networks operate their own electric public utilities, making rate negotiations for the network antennas simple. Corpus Christi did not have that luxury.
"We are not our own public utility here," Scott said. "We had to work out a pole attachment agreement with American Electric Power. They have bent over backward. They have done a tremendous job facilitating this. A lot of people don't understand how big an organization that is, but we were able to run that through in fewer than six months - to get approval for the equipment and pricing for the attachments, which is very minimal."
Speedy Inspectors
Corpus Christi began implementing mobile applications for the network long before finishing it. The city paid cellular companies to install temporary wireless antennas the network could switch to in areas where the official network wasn't completed yet. This enabled a home building inspection application that simplified the inspection process, said Scott."If you're building a house, there are about seven points along that construction process. At those points, somebody from the city has to come out and sign off on your grading plan, your grading, your foundation, the concrete quality, the electrical, the plumbing before you can move to the next step," said Northrop Grumman's
King.
The city pays 19 city building inspectors to do this.
"Each one of those steps took a minimum of five days," King said, "in order to have the developer make the request, get it on somebody's schedule, bring them into the office, get them copies of the drawings, get them copies of the regulations and code, put them in a truck, get them out to that site, survey it, come back, fill out the paperwork, route the paper work to the supervisor for approval, get the paperwork down to the service center, have somebody notify the developer that the paperwork was ready to pick up, send somebody back to the site and post the notice on the approval board."
The new mobile application gives inspectors their assignments via laptops, freeing them to bypass the office in the morning and head straight to their first inspection. They complete their inspections on site, e-mail their reports and digital photos to the various city approvers who all sign off on them by that afternoon, King said.
"Corpus Christi cut 35 to 40 days out of the time it takes to build a house," King said.
The city spent $7.1 million to build the network. Scott expects revenue from leasing 60 percent of the bandwidth to cover those costs and even produce a surplus.
What the Big Boys Get
If you're a large metropolis like Philadelphia, you can attract a large vendor to build a wireless infrastructure on your streetlights at the vendor's expense. Vendors like EarthLink see dense populations as untapped bonanzas for service subscriptions.
Philadelphia formed a separate nonprofit organization called Wireless Philadelphia to pursue a Wi-Fi network for the city. City representatives participate on the organization's board without the project officially being a city project. The organization receives no tax dollars, said Greg Goldman, CEO of Wireless Philadelphia.
Goldman said he could see the value of a city-owned network - mainly the ability to control it and ensure it caters to the needs and desires of citizens. But he said the expenditure required for such a network wasn't politically possible in Philadelphia. Taxpayers favored a model that passed the financial risk on to the vendor.
EarthLink will build the network and sell Internet services on it, but agreed to also lease part of the network to competitors.
Goldman said EarthLink would charge citizens $21.95 per month for Internet services. The vendor will also offer part of the city's low-income population service accounts for $9.95 per month.
EarthLink normally charges customer credit cards each month, but the company is developing alternative payment methods for citizens without credit cards. Wireless Philadelphia and EarthLink will negotiate requirements a citizen must meet for a low-income classification.
"Wireless Philadelphia is responsible for keeping the eye on the prize of digital inclusion," Goldman said.
EarthLink also agreed to annually give Wireless Philadelphia 5 percent of its profits from the network after the project's first three years.
Goldman said he expects EarthLink to complete the network by October 2007.
Broadband in the Boonies
Rural communities without broadband face likely economic demise, said Bob McChing - also known as Bobby Mack - CEO of Momentum Online, a local ISP in Blanco. Vendors typically can't make the services profitable without government assistance.In 2003, the Texas Telecommunications Infrastructure Fund (TIF) offered several grants for implementing wireless functionality to underserved rural areas. The funding enabled local ISPs to expand their infrastructures and offer subscription services to previously unserved areas. The grants stipulated that part of the funding needed to go toward public broadband access at locations like courthouses and libraries.
Blanco County received $250,000 from the TIF. Local government and community leaders formed a committee to disburse the funding
to Momentum Online to implement additional wireless services. The funding enabled the company to expand its fixed wireless infrastructure, allowing more citizens a broadband subscription opportunity. Momentum Online also installed broadband connections at the library and Wi-Fi at the town square.
Mack said he couldn't say exactly how much the expanded infrastructure grew his customer base, but he said it definitely increased.
"Small communities especially look at broadband as the survival of their community. If they don't have broadband, they're at risk," Mack said. "Teenagers leave town when they leave school. Businesses don't come in because broadband is now so critical to business."
Several counties across Texas alone have implemented similar programs to the Blanco County model.
Mack said they've had mixed success. Some are still in business; while others disappeared.
Texas legislators recently killed the TIF rural broadband grants, but Mack said several potential funding sources still exist, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service.
Free for Everybody
Most local governments find citywide free Internet service subsidies too expensive. But some are subtracting the subsidy part altogether. Sacramento and San Francisco, Calif., and Portland, Ore., invited companies offering free citywide Wi-Fi Internet services that include a one-inch advertising banner at the bottom of the screen. The company pays the infrastructure costs and expects to profit from ad revenue. These companies argue their ad space is more valuable because users see it no matter where they travel on the Internet.Time will show whether these networks produce enough ad revenue to support themselves.
Sacramento is currently examining bids from its second RFP attempt at establishing an ad-supported network. The city's original contract with provider MobilePro soured when the company refused some of Sacramento's project additions.
"We did an original RFP back in 2005. There weren't very many models for us to follow, so we pretty much left it wide open for the vendors to tell us what they could do. As that process matured, a lot of other cities started doing Wi-Fi, and there was a lot of press information about it. That information got to the City Council. As time went on and we saw Portland was getting this and San Francisco was getting that, we kept asking our vendor for the same things," said Sacramento CIO Stephen Ferguson.
Ferguson said MobilePro wanted to offer free service at only limited times of each day at a low 56 Kbps. Portland's vendor gave the city 300 Kbps, and both Portland and San Francisco received free service 24 hours per day.
MobilePro insisted it could not profitably agree to those terms unless the city agreed to be an anchor tenant. For MobilePro, that meant Sacramento would obligate itself to purchasing at least $1.4 million in Internet services from the company. The Sacramento City Council refused.
While a number of seemingly innovative deployments are taking place, relatively few have been completed as more cities roll out their networks it's likely best practices will continue to emerge.
Portland's network recently went live in a few central neighborhoods and received approval for citywide implementation.
MetroFi, the city's vendor, will complete the network by mid-2008, according to Logan Kleier, project manager for the Portland Bureau of Technology Services.
