http://newhavenadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:135562
Take My WiFi, Please
Wireless internet service is on New Haven's hi-tech horizon. What's
it mean for you?
by Mark Oppenheimer - December 1, 2005
Rico is sitting in a Fair Haven laundromat, looking up a recipe for
vegetarian mofongo. Britney is in the back room at BAR, pricing out
botox injections on her laptop. Hannah is sitting cross-legged on the
Green, checking prices for hemp imported from British Columbia.
This is the wireless vision for New Haven, and it's a realistic one.
For a city's residents to get the most from the internet, they have
to have internet accessaffordable, high-speed internet access. Best
of all, wireless internet access. Coffeeshop owners have figured this
out; they know that many Americans will go wherever there is free
internet access. A lot of us who own laptop computers like using
those computers outside of our houses. Some of us have computers
equipped to pick up wireless web signals, but we lack the internet
service provider to give us such a signal; we have computers but no
AOL or Earthlink, in other words. This is like having a cable-ready
TV but not subscribing to Comcast.
Here's the problem: If you can afford a computer and have the leisure
time, you can do your internet job searches or single-white-female
searches in the coffeeshop. But what if you live in a poor
neighborhood where there are no coffeeshops that beam an internet
signal to customers' computers (assuming the customers can afford
computers)? And what if internet in your house-from AOL or Earthlink
or Comcastis too expensive? What if, after paying for food and heat
and diapers, you can't afford web access? And what if all the good
jobs that would help you make more money are listed on the web?
This is a problem that government can help fix. And governments in
Europe and Asia have done exactly that. They have guided their
technology policies so that web access is cheaper and more widely
spread than in the United States. It's faster, too, by a factor of
dozens. But in the United States, there is no federal government plan
to bring high-speed internet access to anybody, and none of the 50
states has made high-speed internet access a priority.
Which means it's up to us: the little guy, the neighborhood, the
small town, the city. And, thank goodness, New Haven seems to have
figured it out.
In August, New Haven hired Civitium, a Georgia-based digital
technology consulting firm, to help the city figure out the best way
to get affordable internet service to the entire city. The firm
worked fast, submitting its recommendations within two months; next
month, according to Mayor John DeStefano, the city will issue a
request for proposals, asking internet providers to bid for the
contract to bum-rush New Haven into the age of wireless web. The new
wireless network could be up and running by sometime maybe next
summer, DeStefano says.
The goal is to have a city that beams that wireless signal
everywhere, to every neighborhood, from the Hill to Fair Haven, from
East Rock to West Rock, over to the Annex and Morris Cove. Then, if
you have a computer (and used computers can now be had for $200 or
so) you'll have internet service. You can find a job or a date, buy a
book or a sweater.
Just how will New Haven make this happen?
There are several ways that cities have gone about achieving this goal.
Sometimes, citizens take matters in their own hands. If the residents
of an apartment building buy small routers for their apartments, they
often have enough coverage radius that the street in front of them
becomes a wireless hotspot. Many businesses offer strong wireless
signals, knowing that neighbors can use the signal (in our offices,
the Omni Hotel WiFiwireless fidelitysignal is strong enough that we
can use it). In New York City, NYC Wireless, a non-profit
organization, has gotten parks to agree to place routers at key spots
to turn the parks into free wireless hot spots. So you can sit in
Bryant Park or Union Square and check your email on your laptop.
Parks and businesses and citizens can team up, too, to make a whole
block or neighborhood WiFi-enabled.
Then there is municipal broadband. Dana Spiegel, the executive
director of NYC Wireless, defines municipal broadband as merely the
local government stepping in to spur the development of universal
coverage and affordably priced broadband.
That's what New Haven's city government is planning, but there a
couple of ways they could go about it.
In Lafayette, La., the government built its own fiber cable network
and has become a wholesale broadband internet provider. It not only
gets revenue from its internet customers, but it also gets savings on
its telecommunications costs, because it no longer has to pay a
telecom company to carry its phone and internet traffic.
But
