Wireless Blog

Welcome to The Top Ten Municipal WiFi stories of the decade.

Dailywireless.org, has recorded achievements in broadband wireless for the last 8 years (since March 2002).

We are making a Top Ten of the Decade list in 10 categories.

1. Cellular
2. Wi-Fi
3. Municipal Wireless (this page)
4. Wimax/LTE
5. Bluetooth/UWB/Zigbee
6. Government Actions
7. Infrastructure
8. Satellites
9. RFID and Privacy
10. Devices and applications

Here are the:

Municipal broadband, where city governments build – or encourage a private entity to build – a wireless network was on the radar of municipalities everywhere, in the middle of the decade. It seemed like a sure thing, but was more of a blip.

The idea was compelling. Cities didn’t have to risk capital to get a city-wide broadband network built. Citizens could pay for it — at $19.95/mo (or less). That was about half the cost of DSL or cable modem service. Governments could get broadband wholesale. Data-starved police and fire departments could send photos, maps and reports. All a city needed to do was provide access to roof space and light poles.

It seemed like a sweet deal for everyone.

The technology of choice was unlicensed Wi-Fi, but Fiber Optics and WiMAX were also used for municipal broadband. Between 2005 and 2008, some 350 “city clouds” were proposed in the U.S. The sweet deal turned sour by the end of the decade. Most of the larger “city clouds” were abandoned before construction even started. Others were half-built. A few successfully met their goals.

1. Mesh Networking (2002-2005):
Mesh networking allows WiFi nodes to wirelessly interconnect. DSL or cable modems could be shared. Getting a phone line up a light pole was impractical. Mesh networking solved the problem. Nodes could self-form, even re-route automatically if the link between them failed. Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) became a popular research topic as WiFi radios became affordable.

Several different protocols and techniques were developed. Companies like PacketHop, a spinoff of SRI, and MeshNetworks (bought by Motorola), dominated mobile ad hoc networking by using specialized multi-hopping clients rather than standard WiFi cards. The modified WiFi clients also act as routers.

MobileMesh, an ad-hoc routing protocol from Mitre, was adopted for community networks. MIT’s Roofnet used multi-hop 802.11b. Each node is in radio range of a subset of the other nodes, and can communicate with the rest of the nodes via multi-hop forwarding. Civilians could hop on. You didn’t need to modify a WiFi client.

Enthusiasts like Seattle Wireless saw mesh networking as the key to develop city-wide networks. By 2003, pioneering communities like Stevenson, Washington and Los Gatos, California, got meshed. Ten to twenty nodes would tie into one or two DSL lines.

With dual-band radios, the mesh backbone was moved to 5 GHz. By 2004, WiFi use by the general public was exploding. Mesh networks, originally designed for small, specialized applications, now appeared to be a candidate for commercial networks.

WiFi wasn’t ideal, but it was cheap and ubiquitous.

2. Wireless Community Networks (2002-2005):
Volunteer organizations formed around WiFi networks to collaborate and advocate for the creation of free Community WiFi. The dream was to create a free “cloud”. Neighbors could “repeat” a node, two or three hops, enabling several blocks to be covered.

Brewster Kahle, who went on to form Internet Archive, was the instigator of SF LAN, San Francisco, probably the first community LAN. It started in 1997 using Aironet gear (before 802.11). SF LAN’s Manifesto in 2000 was simple: (1) 1Mb/sec for $1/month in 10 years. (2) Low-cost megabit ISP built by users, spread like a virus. (3) Radio locally, fiber globally.

Matt Peterson founded Bay Area Wireless Users Group in 2000 after developing the PlayaNET at Burning Man. I remember writing a story in the January 2001 edition of ComputerBits about community LANs. Within months, SeattleWireless, and PersonalTelco were formed and were joined by literaly dozens of grass roots groups including, Austin Wireless, BC Wireless, CUWireless , Melbourne Wireless, NYC WirelessSoCalFreenet.org, and many others, embedding NoCatSplash on a Linksys 54G and experimenting with different user models.

Wireless Community Networks were a phenomena. When rugged outdoor mesh routers became available around 2004, they were too pricey for hobbyists. But The Suits saw commercial possibilities.

3. Tropos (2002-2005):
Tropos Networks took the research in mesh networking and designed a Predictive Wireless Routing Protocol (PWRP) that “scales to thousands of nodes” and designed an industrial strength outdoor WiFi router to deliver it.

Local WiFi and a backbone required only one WiFi radio. They were fast and cheap when compared to police radios and had two big advantages; (1) WiFi required no license and (2) people already had WiFi clients.

Tropos said that their system could uniquely cover wide areas with WiFi for about $65K per square mile. Tropos found a market. Network integrators like Earthlink drank the Koolaid. Other vendors joined the fray.

In 2005, ABI Research predicted that by 2010 municipal Wi-Fi networks would increase from about 1,500 square miles worldwide (3885 sq km), to 126,000 square miles (over 325,000 sq km), an area larger than New Mexico. More than one million wireless mesh routers would be shipped in 2010, said ABI, with manufacturing revenues exceeding US$ 1.2 billion.

But instead of the original 25 nodes per sq mile, 40 nodes per sq mile became more realistic. That drove costs up exponentially. the Tropos 5320 router was introduced, using a 5GHz radio exclusively for the mesh. The company developed a TMCX specification to provide a best-practices guide for building in-home Wi-Fi modems. Metro Compatible Extensions Version 2 didn’t help much. Indoor penetration sucked and outdoor coverage was unrelable.

It was High Noon for City Clouds. Vendors knew that WiFi wasn’t ideal, but there was a demand for a WiFi solution. They prayed for a miracle chip in the client to save them. It didn’t happen.

4. Philadelphia (2003-2005):
Philadephia Mayor John Street and Dianah Neff, the city’s chief information officer, heard about the development of municipal WiFi. They developed an RFP for Philadelphia (pop: 1.6 million) in August, 2004. It would deliver affordable, city-wide WiFi, for government and citizens and bridge the Digital Divide. Subscriptions would pay for it all. In August, 2005, the city chose two proposals, (later merged into one). The proposals pegged the cost of building and maintaining the network for the first two years at between $15 million and $18 million.

Wireless Philadelphia expected their cost to be just under $75,000 per square mile — plus $5 million to run it for the first two years. But the costs were higher, the service was poorer, and the subscribers were fewer than hoped. Then Earthlink pulled out.

The Earthlink network was bought the Network Acquisition Co. in June 2008 for $2 million, by a former Tropos investor and investment banker. This week, the city of Philadelphia announced that it will buy Wireless Philadelphia for $2 million from NAC, reports Philly.com. But the network will require significant additional investment — some $17 million between fiscal 2011 and 2015, and will still fall short of the city’s ambitious 2004 plans.

Earthlink’s municipal wireless system for Philadelphia promised to revolutionize city-wide broadband, and triggered a short-lived global movement for municipal WiFi. But the infrastructure, with thousand of nodes and attendant backhaul, proved less cost/effective then projected. The system suffered from reliability and lack of in-building penetration. WiFi itself was largely to blame.

Philadelphia was the pioneer. They accumulated a fair share of arrows in the back, along with its system integrator Earthlink and their preferred vendor, Tropos.

5. The MuniFi Movement (2004-2006):
With the success of Tropos Networks and the 135,000 square mile Philadelphia Network awarded to Earthlink, municipal WiFi looked real. A revolution was underway.

Big City municipal Wi-Fi projects included; New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland and New Orleans. Vendors like BelAir Networks, Firetide, Strix Systems and SkyPilot, flush with venture capital, hit the streets with their own WiFi gear.

Cities saw little downside, since intergrators pay the costs. Cities had only to provide public rights of way, rooftops and light poles. Cities large and small wanted in. World-wide. RFPs began flying.

Virtually all the major municipal wireless networks hit the skids when the limitations of WiFi became apparent.

6. Huge Regional WiFi Nets (2004-2006):
Huge regional broadband wireless networks were even planned. City clouds, tied together using fiber or WiMAX, it was thought, would be the next big thing. Multiple counties could buy in and reduce costs. Like city clouds before, it sometimes looked like an exercise in bragging rights, to see who could plan the largest. Huge city clouds, built in Taipei and Hong Kong, seemed to indicate that anything was possible.

It wasn’t.

• Ten Colorado cities created a vast wireless broadband network for residents, businesses and visitors. The anticipated project deployment was the Fall of 2007.
• A 720-square-mile Wi-Fi zone in Michigan, Wireless Washtenaw, would provide 802.11b/g in urban Ann Arbor and 802.11a in the 600-square-mile rural area of Washtenaw County.
• Wireless Silicon Valley, in California, gathered 41 cities together to deploy a wireless network that will cover nine counties over a 12,000-square-mile area, including Sacramento County, and over 30 municipalities with a combined population of about 3 million
  

  Wireless Silicon Valley planned to serve some 2.4 million people, including the city of Sacramento (pop: 450,000).

• South of Seattle, the Pierce County Wi-Fi network planned a 1,500 square mile broadband wireless network. The Rainier Communications Commission, a countywide consortium of municipalities, voted to give a contract to CenturyTel to provide WiFi service to Pierce County’s 754,000 residents.
• State-wide Wireless Broadband Access was also proposed by Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Vermont.

In the end, the largest regional Wi-Fi cloud was also the first built — and the most successful.

The 700 square mile cloud, built by EZ Wireless in Eastern Oregon, covers four counties and seven cities. After lots of experimenting and equipment changes, the network has become a workhorse for four counties. It operates as a public safety network.

7. The Crash (2007):
Big City municipal Wi-Fi projects in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, San Francisco, Portland and New Orleans all hit the skids when the limitations of WiFi became apparent.

• Portland, Oregon: MetroFi, said it needed an infusion of cash to complete the 134 sq mile system (video), and wanted the city to become an anchor tenant. The city said no. It was used by about 15,000 users per month before it crashed and burned.
• New Orleans lost its municipal Wi-Fi network when EarthLink halted its participation in the citywide project. First, EarthLink tried to sell the network outright. Second, it sought to transfer ownership of the network to the city of New Orleans. Finally, it tried to transfer the network to a third party. No go.
• Corpus Christi, sold their system to EarthLink then got it back. EarthLink shut down public WiFi for Corpus Christi in May, 2008. The City Council opted to take back control and return the network to its original purpose–smart meter reading and other municipal services.The city got roughly $3 million in equipment and upgrades.
• Tempe, Ariz.: Passed through at least three owners in less than three years. The current owner, Globility, came to an impasse with its suppliers, and unplugged the network’s authentication servers. Kite Networks, ran the Tempe and Chandler, Arizona, systems, which have since shut down. MobilePro sold their Kite Networks division (NeoReach), to Gobility. Gobility was trying to sell to a California firm. The city declared Globility in default of the contract.

• San Francisco’s WiFi Network never got off the ground. A Meraki network is developing in San Francisco, from its origin as a 1-square-mile testbed and is based on MIT’s RoofNet. Meraki is funding the San Francisco deployment, as a showcase of what the technology can do. SFLan aims to build a wireless network with LAN characteristics on a metropolitan scale and are proposing a city-wide network that addresses low income users, in lieu of the pullout by Earthlink.
• OpenAirBoston Regrouped. City leaders insisted they aren’t backing away from their ultimate goal of Wi-Fi in every corner of Boston. Instead, they said, they’re abandoning their original timetable to refocus on a series of neighborhood “bubbles” that test technology and business models. Right.
• Dallas and Chicago are forgoing any public WiFi network and deploying wireless video surveillance networks in specific areas.
• Wireless Minneapolis: About 85% of the city is covered with an 4.9GHz public safety band deployed. It is being used now by some inspectors and public works employees, and was widely praised during the Minneapolis bridge collapse in 2007. It’s one of the few city clouds that seems to be delivering on its promises.
• St. Louis. AT&T proposed a wireless network among the city’s 62 square miles, but AT&T and the city couldn’t find a cost-effective way to power the WiFi nodes. Wireless Internet network covered one square mile of downtown St. Louis. Don’t expect to see a citywide system any time soon. The citywide plan was nixed a couple years ago.
  
• In Grand Rapids, Clearwire is building a WiMAX network that covers all 45 square miles of the city with the city trading access to infrastructure in exchange for reduced rates for government and low income access. Clearwire only requires 10 to 15 towers to cover 100 square miles, versus some 40 WiFi access points per square mile at $100K per square mile for WiFi. Do the math.
• Cablevision is building a WiFi network in New York, paying some $350 million, or $100 per subscriber, to create a wireless network that’s free for its cable modem subscribers. All others pay cash. The 5th largest cable company says it expects to complete New York’s WiFi network around 2010.
• Long Island’s wireless Internet project a $150-million Wi-Fi system to cover 750 of the Island’s 1,200 square miles without a dollar of taxpayer funds, is months past its initial target date and its future looks doubtful, says Newday.
• Wireless Silicon Valley.: The grandeous vision of three years ago, delivering some 2.4 million people, was first scaled back to several test phases. Then, Azulstar, the startup that was to build and operate the network, couldn’t get funding even for two test networks, at about $500,000 each.

8. WiFi Reborn? (2007):
Theories that municipal Wi-Fi would kill the telcos and cellular business proved exaggerated, but so too is the talk of the imminent demise of municipal networking. The iPhone and Netbooks have proven to be a huge factor in the growth of broadband wireless services.

Cellular providers can’t keep up with consumer demand for bandwidth.

As Robb Henshaw, of Proxim Wireless points out, operators’ revenues have increased by 50 to 100 percent due to data revenue, but data services have increased 3G traffic by anywhere from 500 to 1000 percent. 3G networks are completely overloaded in big cities like New York and San Francisco.

AT&T has said that the number of people connecting to its 20,000 plus domestic hotspots has more than tripled from 3.4 million in Q108 to 10.5 million in Q109. Free Wi-Fi at McDonalds and Free Wi-Fi at Barnes and Noble are examples of a new business model.

It could benefit consumers, cellular providers and businesses. Offloading data traffic from 3G and 4G networks to WiFi may finally be an idea whose time has come – thanks to smartphones like the iPhone and Android — which are driving a new demand for WiFi access.

Then there’s the federal stimulus.

This week, Vice President Biden announced more than $182 million in broadband grants and loans to bring Internet services to communities that currently do not have it. That accounts for only 9 percent of the $2 billion that will be dispensed by the end of February. In turn, that $2 billion represents only 27 percent of the $7.2 billion in federal funding allocated for broadband stimulus grants.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) announced today that they received almost 2,200 applications requesting nearly $28 billion in funding for proposed broadband projects reaching all 50 U.S. states.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was signed into law on February 17, 2009. The Broadband Initiatives funded in the Act are intended to accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits.

ABI Research indicates that wireless connections will remain the dominant technology, with Wi-Fi connections expected to rise from 113 million in 2008 to more than 285 million by 2012. Ethernet will remain a strong second place.

9. Campus WiFi and Beamforming (2008):
Campus and College WiFi
The University of California at San Diego installed about 2,400 802.11n APs from Cisco in almost all of the school’s 150 buildings. The university serves more than 40,000 students and staff and has 28,000 active Wi-Fi users. Brandeis University now has about 110 APs from Aruba Networks running 802.11a/b/g/n in newer buildings, with more than 800 APs on a/b/g alone.

Some classes require a laptop. Video and other data-rich applications used for academic purposes are expected to mushroom in coming years. The same holds true for businesses. WiFi will be in 99% of US schools in 2013, in phones, cafes, trains, planes and automobiles. Pretty much everywhere. Maybe WiFi won’t be as ubiquitous as cellular signals, but it will be where people congregate.

Ruckus claims it can deliver broadband cheaper with fewer access points through “beam forming” and can eliminate the start up and deployment costs of WiMAX.

Ruckus combines 802.11n with dynamic beamforming. They claim to overcome interference problems that have plagued many outdoor Wi-Fi networks. Ruckus will compete with other outdoor 802.11n products from Cisco, Meru Networks, Aruba Networks and Meraki, which has a $1500 802.11n system.

Nothing delivers bandwidth more cost/effectively than WiFi — especially 802.11n — which has multiple radios and antennas for better range and speed. Campuses, business parks, schools and buildings may become the new “cloud”.

10. White Spaces (2009):
White spaces are unused television frequencies. They have been freed up by the shift to digital television. Analog television required broadcasters to leave blank televison channels between nearby transmitters to prevent cross channel interference. Digital television created much more “free space” in the television band.

Google supports the white space concept, as does Microsoft, Dell, and other consumer electronics companies. Broadcasters have consistently opposed “white space” legislation, claiming they may cause harmful interference to television reception.

A study commissioned by Microsoft estimates that the unlicensed “white spaces” spectrum could be worth more than $100 billion over the next 15 years.

A November 2008 FCC decision opened up white spaces in the broadcast televison band, from 512MHz to 698MHz. TV white spaces can cover larger areas areas than WiFi, although their power is limted to 1 watt (100mW mobile).

For the first time in the U.S., “white spaces” are being used to wirelessly deliver high-speed Internet connectivity (pdf). Microsoft, Dell, and Spectrum Bridge helped design and deploy a wireless TV white spaces network to distribute broadband Internet connectivity in Claudville, Virginia, under an experimental license granted by the FCC. Whether it will prove effective for municipal broadband wireless is anyone’s guess.

Okay, those are my arbitrary Top Ten Municipal Wi-Fi news stories of the decade. What are yours?