Watsonville, Calif., population 47,000, is an agricultural community with a large Spanish-speaking population -- nearly half under 18 years of age. The city uses a WiFi link -- originally designed to cover a radius of only 150 feet -- to connect City Hall with the city landfill, four miles away. The network is used for e-mail and file storage, and while a modem link wouldn't work for file storage, the WiFi does the job very well.
To make the link work, said the city's Joel Staker -- at the recent "Wireless Community & Mobile User Conference," in Monterey, Calif. -- the WiFi runs on Cisco 350s. The landfill link -- part of a larger network -- runs at 11mbps, and cost only about $2,000-$3,000 to install. Staker said that an ISDN or 256K system would have an up-front fee and recurring fees that would be expensive over time. Microwave would have cost in the neighborhood of $20,000.
The city also uses WiFi to connect its airport offices to a fiber backbone. "It's only a 700-foot distance," said Watsonville IT Manager Jeff Merrill, "but, for a variety of reasons, we've had many delays in getting the airport connected via fiber to our hardwired network. WiFi was a good stop-gap alternative."
Staker, however, said there are a few cautions about using WiFi as they do. "It's unlicensed, and there will be a few collisions with other people and other access points, and a bit of dropoff." And for the landfill link, the distance is much further than intended for WiFi.
"The Ciscos like to dissociate and reassociate," said Staker of the landfill link, "and part of our problem is to figure out why that is happening. If it's interference that is the cause, they have to go through a mathematical process to reassociate, and that can take a number of seconds and that slows it down. Any time it drops off, we don't want that. If it gets to the point where we get significant downtime, we would simply move to a licensed spectrum -- Broadcom or somebody else. It may be as much as 10 times more expensive, but you still have the same benefit that there's no recurring fees, and in the future there wouldn't be the problem of other people on your same frequency." But, said Staker, the benefits of WiFi are easy to spot: "It's just cheap."
Wayne E. Hanson served as a writer and editor with e.Republic from 1989 to 2013, having worked for several business units including Government Technology magazine, the Center for Digital Government, Governing, and Digital Communities. Hanson was a juror from 1999 to 2004 with the Stockholm Challenge and Global Junior Challenge competitions in information technology and education.
