http://www.indypendent.org/?p=1092
GOT A HOTSPOT: Jonathan Evans, Michael Evans and Kamal King of
Wireless Harlem
(above, from left) are helping to create free wifi hotspots
throughout Harlem. Photo: Mauricio Quintero
By Erin Thompson
On a street corner in Harlem, Kamal King and Jonathan Evans are
taking pictures of light poles. They record the coordinates of each
light pole and will eventually send the data to city, which will
hopefully allow them to install wireless radios on light poles around
Harlem.
When installed, these radios will begin the test phases of a Harlem-
wide wireless infrastructure, which the Wireless Harlem Initiative
aims to use to provide free or lowcost broadband residents to all
nearby Harlem residents.
Members of NYC Wireless, a non-profit that creates wireless hotspots
around the city in public parks, local businesses and low-income
housing, first introduced King and Evans to the possibilities of the
low-cost broadband networks at Monroe College.
“It was kind of exciting,” said Evans “NYC wireless came to our
school, and this school is in the Bronx … And these white people came
to our school and were like ‘hey this is wonderful.’”
For their final project in the class, King and Evans hooked up a
local coffee shop with a free Wi-Fi hotspot. “We got an A,” said
King, who discovered the not-for-profit Wireless Harlem on the
Internet one night and has been involved ever since.
On a small scale, the efforts of community groups like Wireless
Harlem and NYC Wireless reflect the hundreds of initiatives
undertaken by communities and municipalities around the country to
address the growing “digital divide.”
According to a March 2006 report by the Pew Internet and American
Life Project, only 21 percent of households with an annual income of
$30,000 or less had any broadband connection at home in 2006, while
68 percent of households that earn over $75,000 had a home broadband
connection.
This is especially the case in Harlem, where Wireless Harlem has
spent the last year doing research and advocacy to push their project
forward.
“What our research told us is that there are too many people on one
computer and that computer may be dial-up — and so there’s a
bottleneck in the household, with four or five people trying to get
on one computer,” said Michael Lewis, founder of Wireless Harlem.
At the first of five hearings organized by the city to address the
issue of Internet access, held on March 30 in the Bronx, community
wireless campaigners, technology experts, policy advocates and
students and teachers from the city’s underserved schools testified
on the conditions of broadband access in New York.
Andrew Gallagher, a public school teacher at the Bronx Writing
Academy, said that only 20 percent of his students report having a
computer and access to the Internet at home.
Students from New York’s Brandeis High School reported that as few as
nine laptops might serve 50 students, many of whom do not have
Internet access at home. “Many of us even fail because we don’t have
computers,” one student testified.
For long-time advocates of broadband access, the hearings are a first
step in joining the rest of the country.
“There needs to be a wider public understanding of this issue, and
that needs to be demonstrated by people showing up to these public
hearings,” said Laura Forlano, a board member of NYC Wireless.
Why has installing an increasingly vital communications resource —
one which costs relatively little to install and maintain — become
such a struggle in New York City and around the country?
“The short answer is, unless someone is willing to go out and rewrite
the past [Federal Communications Commission] FCC regulations and
unless they open up the [telecommunications] networks to competition,
there’s not a rat’s chance in hell that anything exciting is going to
happen in New York,” said Bruce Kushnick, a consumer rights’ advocate
and founder of Teletruth.org.
While the FCC plays an important part by setting policy, other
interests play an even more profound role.
Who Really Owns the Internet?
The word “Internet” brings to mind an ever-expanding, amorphous ether
of infor-mation — a network that cannot be controlled and which
expands and changes as more and more people use it. Yet the Internet
depends on the physical infrastructure that must support the packets
of data traveling between computer networks and servers. That
infrastructure includes a web of cable, telephone and fiber lines
crisscrossing the United States, allowing the data to zip around the
country and world.
While no one owns the Internet, a handful of powerful telephone and
cable companies control the fiber, cable and copper wires that
support the Internet. Competition in the telecommunications market
has been obliterated by years of deregulation, mergers and the
elimination of “common carrier obligations” (see timeline). This
means attempts to bridge the digital divide and prevent further
disparities face a gauntlet of resistance from one of the most
powerful industries in the country.
“The main impediment to everything is the telecommunications industry
— this is not even like business versus the small guy, this is a few
very specific corporations versus this is a few very specific
corporations versus all other business interests and human interests
in the country,” said Josh Breitbart, a New York-based media activist
who has blogged extensively on municipal wireless initiatives.
Originally public in mission and government run (ARPANET, the
forerunner of the Internet, was in part an invention of the
Pentagon), a series of regulatory changes led to the gradual
privatization of Internet infrastructure — with the
Telecommunications Act of 1996 marking a milestone in the
deregulation of the entire communications industry. (See page 8
sidebar).
A 2005 ruling from the Supreme Court in FCC v. Brand X Internet
Services freed the telecoms from government regulations requiring
them to lease their lines at discounted rates to other Internet
service providers, a concept known as common carriage requirements.
This effectively gutted competition between the largest conglomerates
that own most of the Internet infrastructure. Media giants like
Verizon and AT&T and Time Warner, which now own most of the
infrastructure, want to tack on hefty premiums for services like
voice and video on top of the fees they already charge consumers for
DSL, fiber and cable networks, threatening the fundamentally open
nature of the Internet.
“The biggest danger for the Internet right now is that we are going
to trade a binary divide of online/offline for a more subtle
disparity between speed and usefulness,” said Breitbart.
By doing so, the telecoms are threatening the most radical and
democratic features of the Internet.
“The Internet makes radically cheaper the provision of these once
quite complicated services,” said Lucas Graves, a Ph.D. candidate at
Columbia University studying the history of the Internet. “If the
Internet were treated as a utility, as sort of the federal highway
system, and you just had a basic public trust or public investment
that took care of providing the pipes, then the computers that we all
use can pretty much do everything else.”
Instead, telecommunications companies are set on creating a tiered
toll-road for consumers, all the while squashing initiatives aimed at
leveling access.
An “Out of Control Spiral” of Disinvestment
While many countries around the world are investing in upgrades to
fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks, 98 percent of Americans access the
Internet via DSL and cable modem services, which, although faster
than dial-up, are significantly slower than fiber optic networks. In
areas deemed “economically unfeasible” for telecommunications
investment, there may no available alternative to dial-up. According
to a January 2007 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 10
percent of U.S. households do not have access to broadband from any
provider. Meanwhile, broadband subscribers in the United States pay
twice as much as customers in Asia and Europe and get a fraction of
the speed. First in broadband penetration rates just 10 years ago,
the United States is now ranked fifteenth in the world by the Paris-
based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“This is a spiral, an out-of-control spiral of us losing our
competitive edge, internationally,” said Sascha Meinrath, a community
wireless pioneer and Internet activist.
This downward spiral is due in part to a refusal by the
telecommunications industry to build out promised fiber networks.
Telephone companies received $200 billion in state tax breaks and
price deregulation over the past decade on the promise that they
would deploy 86 million new lines of fiber infrastructure by 2006,
according to Bruce Kushnick, author of The $200 Billion Broadband
Scandal.
“The phone companies lied and took the money and didn’t build the
networks,” Kushnick said. “And now what they’re offering is basically
inferior to what’s currently being rolled out and deployed in Japan
and other countries.”
Currently, fewer than 500,000 fiber optic lines have been built. The
areas where phone companies are rolling out new fiber infrastructure
are almost exclusively affluent. In New York, for example, of the
nearly 100 communities targeted for fiber optic deployments, 96
percent had incomes above the state median.
“In short they’ve hijacked the utilities to make it a private company
with their own exclusive rights,” Kushnick said.
Beyond the Digital Divide: UTOPIA and Mesh Networks
At the same time that the telecommunications industry is trying to
exert more and more control over the digital sphere, other forces are
attempting to push the digital world in the other direction.
“There are two forces that are interacting that can disrupt the
current situation, one of them is technological innovation,
specifically wireless, the other one is government involvement,
specifically municipal,” said Breitbart.
Wireless technology, which uses the same low-powered, unlicensed
spectrum that garage door openers use, has been a transformative
force for broadband proliferation because it allows more than one
user to share an Internet connection, while being relatively cost-
effective to deploy. The traditional wireless model of a “hotspot”
has its limitations, however. The relatively low strength of Wi-Fi
signals can only reach a few hundred feet and requires “line of
sight” for access. For people in their homes, an outside signal can
often be weak or non-existent.
What’s more, for anyone who doesn’t own their own fiber, cable or DSL
infrastructure, implementing wireless systems still means renting
broadband access from an Internet service provider.
Some cities are thus pursuing options that might return the Internet
to its roots as an open highway that anyone can access and which
cannot bar some types of traffic or charge more for others.
Successful initiatives to build municipal fiber infrastructure have
been deployed across the country. One of the largest initiatives, the
Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA), a
publicly-funded municipal broadband initiative, built fiber across
325 miles of the state and connected 250,000 homes. Many communities
attempting to address the growing digital divide by implementing low-
cost wireless systems or building locally owned high-speed fiber
infrastructure are facing political and legal hurdles. States across
the nation have rushed to pass laws prohibiting municipalities from
entering the broadband market at the behest of powerful
telecommunications oligopolies that funnel millions of dollars in
lobbying money and campaign contribution into political coffers. (See
page 8 sidebar ) When Philadelphia pursued plans to build a municipal
wireless network in 2004, Verizon lobbied the State House to pass a
law banning the state’s municipalities from directly offering fee-
based Internet service. In order to implement wireless, Philadelphia
eventually signed a deal with Earthlink to build and maintain the
city’s wireless system, offering baseline wireless service at $22 a
month and a lower-rate of $9.95 a month for low-income subscribers.
After similar displays of telecom lobbying muscle in other states,
“Most other cities took a politically more palatable route,” notes
Forlano of NY C Wireless. By the end of 2004, 13 states had
implemented laws barring municipalities from competing with incumbent
broadband service providers.
While efforts like those in Philadelphia elsewhere represent a step
toward shrinking the digital divide, for community-wireless advocates
they represent a missed opportunity for cities to radically
restructure their Internet capabilities.
Pass The Champaign!
“The major providers that are doing [municipal] networks are solely
doing them to maintain their single-payer model — one person pays a
price for their [Internet] connection point. That’s why AT&T is in
this, that’s why Comcast is in this — this is why Earthlink is in
this,” said Meinrath, who is the co-founder of the Champaign-Urbana,
Illinois. Wireless Network (CUWiN).
CUWiN uses “mesh technology” to expand wireless coverage for free to
anyone who has a computer and wireless card. In addition, it creates
a local area network between comput ers using the wireless network –
which can then communicate among themselves without needing an
Internet connection.
While deployed on a small scale in Urbana, with only a few hundred
people logged into the network on any given day, the network is a
glimpse at the power that new, open-source technologies like the mesh
wireless system have to connect people on a local level.
“If you have a ubiquitous wireless infrastructure that can be your
communitywide broadcast station, anyone can put up a streaming server
and broadcast their own radio station. Anyone can provide video…
audio. Anyone can start doing web hosting in their local community,”
said Meinrath.
“New York City Isn’t Doing Anything”
Such utopian dreams — and even the possibility of building a wireless
network along the lines of those in Philadelphia and San Francisco —
seem far away in New York City. While most major cities already have
began planning or implementing some form of a municipal broadband
network in order to extend an increasingly vital resource to its
citizenry, New York City has only taken the first steps in addressing
broadband access.
“It’s embarrassing that New York City isn’t doing anything and every
other major city in the U.S., if not the world, is doing something,”
said Bruce Lai, the chief of staff for New York City Councilwoman
Gail Brewer, who chairs the City Council’s Committee on Technology in
Government.
Nonetheless, upcoming hearings are an opportunity for concerned
citizens to pressure the city to act. “If there were just floods of
people with stories that helped illustrate exactly what the problem
in New York was,” Forlano said, “then maybe we’d have a government
solution.”
“If you don’t have [influence] on the side that controls most of the
money and the policy,” Lai concludes, “the only way to get around it
is to organize.”
The New York City Broadband Advisory Committee will hold its second
public hearing on May 22 from 12-3 p.m. to take public testimony. The
hearing will be held at Borough Hall, 209 Joralemon Street, Bkyn. For
more information: nycwireless.net
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