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 "WiFi"wireless 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 more commonly, says Spiegel, "municipal broadband could be the
government putting out a contract with a company after an appropriate
competition, and providing guaranteed rates for the use of local,
government-owned facilities in order to build a network that is run
by the private companyand also, in exchange for this, requiring that
there be affordable access provided to all members of the community.
"The most popular model is to contract out the building, operation
and maintenance of the network, let a private company do all the
development, but they get use of government-owned buildings for the
infrastructure [like antennae].
"This is not a new modelthis is how cable TV was developed," Spiegel
adds. "The city said, ’Okay, we'll franchise you to do this, we'll
give you access to our rights of way, you can use under our streets,
on our buildings. In exchange, you need to pay us, provide community
access TV, and all sorts of other things. And these are the benefits
that a local government got out of a business using their resources.'"
With wireless web, the benefits would be different, but the franchise
model could be the same.
That's what Philadelphia is hoping, anyway. In October, the city
chose Earthlink to manage a wireless network for the entire city. The
cost to Philly taxpayers would be nil; Earthlink will put up the $10
to $15 million to build the infrastructure, then will recoup its
investment by charging users $20 a month, or $10 to low-income
families. Any profits will be shared with the city. Chicago, Miami
Beach, Milwaukee, and Portland, Or., are also exploring municipal
wireless. In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom put out a call for
proposals, and Google responded last month by offering to blanket the
city for free; the company would derive its revenues from
advertisements that would appear on users' screens, if the city hires
Google.
It's too early to know what the specifics of a New Haven plan would
be, of course; it all depends on what kinds of proposals the city
gets. But DeStefano says that he's "pretty certain we want a private
provider to do it. It's probably not something [city government] can
do consistently excellent and well." And he also doesn't expect the
wireless service to be free, like what Google is proposing for San
Francisco; nor does he predict a sliding scale, like the one in
Philadelphia. New Haven will provide service "as cheaply as
possible," he says. But "the goal here is not to provide need-based
broadband service. We [already] provide access to service in our
public libraries and public schools."
The goal is not, in other words, to yank poor people up to tech
parity with the middle-class and educated; rather, the goal is to
secure as low a cost as possible for everyone in the city, and at no
cost to the city. It's a sensible, eminently achievable plan; if New
Haven can pull this off, the city's business, civic and intellectual
climates will surely benefit. And if the city can pull it off by next
summer, then three cheers for civic efficiency. (Governor's mansion,
anybody?)
But some critics say that low-cost internet would, without special
educational programs and financial assistance, leave many New Haven
residents no better off.
What commentators call "the digital divide" is very real, and it
shows no signs of closing soon. In the United States, Asian-Americans
are more likely to use the internet than whites; whites more likely
than blacks; blacks more likely than Hispanics. (Nobody is more
likely than Dr. Who fans and junior high chess champions.) According
to a 2002 report by the Tom's Rivera Policy Institute, written for
the IBM Hispanic Digital Divide Task Force, in 2001 40 percent of
Hispanic households had computers, compared to 61.6 percent of non-
Hispanic white households. The internet penetration for those
households was 32 percent, compared with 55.4 percent for non-
Hispanic whites. In addition, while there have been increases in the
absolute number of Spanish-language websites, those sites have
decreased as a proportion of all websites; in other words, in the sea
of billions of websites that one might need to use for work or social
life, the percentage of them comprehensible to those who read Spanish
is getting smaller. While these numbers are several years old,
there's no reason to think that matters have improved much.
Which means that a city that is more wired than ever, where
increasing numbers of people have internet access, could also be a
city in which the digital divide is wider than ever. If important
websiteslike, say, Craig's List, the web clearinghouse that lists
apartments for rent, used bikes for sale, baby-sitting services, and
so forthtend to be written in English only, then Hispanics could feel
increasingly alienated from web culture, and increasingly alienated
from middle-class white society.
Kica Matos, the head of JUNTA for Progressive Action, a social
services agency in Fair Haven, paints a pessimistic picture.
"I can tell you right now that [wireless web] would be of next to no
use to the population we serve," Matos says, "because Latinos in this
community have a) little to no familiarity with the technology and b)
lag behind in the information superhighway in general. We're talking
about people without modem access.
"We do intakes of all of our clients, and about 80 percent of people
say they neither own a computer nor have access to a computer," adds
Matos. "I think about how much of the work I do now on the internetit
provides you with so much information. The population we work with,
they haven't discovered the internet. So even access to online job
postings our clients don't know about them."
Laura Forlano, who is on the board of NYC Wireless and is writing her
Columbia dissertation about wireless web, says that it's not just a
matter of getting people the hardware; you have to get them the
skills and make sure there are websites that will be user-friendly
for them.
For example, Forlano says, "If your idea is to connect people to get
job information, you'd want to look at whether that community has
hardware to access network, whether websites are available with that
information on it, and whether people can read the websites. You need
a holistic, comprehensive approach.
"It takes partnerships with local non-profits for skills training,
perhaps for creating special portal pages with information specific
for that community. If the need is for people to have jobs, then
there would probably need to be content developed and designed by a
non-profit or the government, maybe a search tool that would help a
specific population look for jobs in their area.
"Access to network alone is not going to help people who, for
example, can't read the information on it, or it's too difficult to
aggregate the information available. If you look at the elderly, it's
possible there are applications and services on internet that are
extremely useful for them, but as a group they have been overlooked
in terms of, say, an events page for senior citizens to find an event
in neighborhood. And they need training and assistance, and possibly
don't have hardware either."
So Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com don't cut it. They were designed
to be popular among people who already use the web, not among
occasional, intimidated, and tech-wary people who are not at home in
the web world.
And it's not just a matter of speaking English; it's a matter of
knowing the byways of the web. For most of my friends, the most
useful application of all is Google, the search engine that allows
people to enter a string of words and then locates websites that
feature those words prominently. But knowing which words to use is a
skill, honed over years of using computer search engines like Lycos,
Excite and Yahoo! It takes practice to know that if you want words to
appear in a particular order, you have to put them in quotation
marks, or to know that non-profit organizations' web pages end with
".org," not ".com." And when you don't know this stuff, it helps to
have friends who do. The fact is, it's easier to get computer
assistance from the guy sitting next to you in a college computer
cluster or at an upscale coffeeshop than at an ethnic restaurant in a
minority neighborhood.
But the biggest obstacles to municipal wireless don't come from the
activists who are skeptical of its power to bridge the digital
divide. The bigger threat is the telecommunications industry, which
is terrified that reduced-cost WiFi, sponsored by local governments,
will draw people away from the telecoms' more expensive services.
After all, to take one example, once Philadelphia gets its service,
partnered with Earthlink, up and fully running, it stands to reason
that a lot of residents will ditch AOL.
In a truly horrifying display of how influence can be purchased with
campaign contributions, the telecom industry has successfully lobbied
several state governments to make it difficult for government to
offer this service. After Philadelphia announced its municipal
wireless plan last year, "Verizon spent more than $3 million to lobby
the state government to pass a bill preventing cities and townships
in Pennsylvania from offering broadband or wireless services unless
the phone company has refused to do so" (to quote a fine article on
the topic by Adam Penenberg, from the online magazine Slate ). After
the law passed, Philly bureaucrats basically had to secure Verizon's
permission before they could proceed with Earthlink.
It gets worse. Gov. Jeb Bush signed a Florida law that prevents
cities from offering broadband where private companies provide the
service. Nevada has a law on the books that prohibits most cities and
counties from offering any telecom services at all (again, this would
include phone service that could save the towns serious money). Texas
has made muni telecom completely illegal. And Rep. Pete Sessions, a
Texas Republican who owns between $500,000 and $1 million in SBC
stock options, has introduced a bill that would ban any local
government in the country from offering telecom in areas where it
would compete with private companies.
People calling themselves free marketeers would argue that the
government undercutting private businesses is anti-competitive and
should be illegal. They would even point to the law against competing
with first-class mail: While private companies may ship packages (via
FedEx, UPS, etc.), only the government may charge money to send your
letter to Mom in Idaho. If that restriction is fair game, then why
not restrictions protecting private businesses, who operate in a more
competitive market? If the government can get a postal monopoly, why
shouldn't private businesses get protection from government's
predatory pricing on wireless web?
There's a basic difference. The postal service maintains its monopoly
in order to better serve everyone, regardless of where people live.
By keeping competitors out of the first-class mail market, the postal
service can charge me 37 cents to mail a letter from New Haven to New
York (the real cost is much lower). The extra money is used to
subsidize mail from, say, Hartford to Alaska, which otherwise would
be quite expensive. It's a nice bit of social engineering that
ensures that moving far from home won't price you out of sending
letters home.
Keeping government out of the wireless web game, however, is not
progressive but reactionary. Private industry has not shown any
particular desire to bring effective wireless to poor communities.
The telecoms certainly have no interest in subsidizing wireless for
people who can't afford their usual rates.
What's more, the telecoms have shown no interest in actual
innovation. So long as they are eking their profits out of local
towns, they don't much care if the U.S. is falling behind other
countries. And it wasn't supposed to be this way. The 1996
Telecommunications Act, which required companies to share telephone
lines, opened the world up to numerous internet providers, with real
price competition (this is why your AOL is cheaper now than 10 years
ago). It looked as if there might be real progress coming from this
competition, but the Supreme Court later ruled that the Federal
Communications Commission can't require a cable company to share its
infrastructure. So the cable companieswhich got their infrastructure
from the local governments to begin withnow had monopolies once again
(which is why Comcast is the only cable I can get). Since then, there
has been consolidation in the industry, so that fewer than 10 large
companies provide cable for almost all of the United Stateswhile
facing little competition in individual markets.
Meanwhile, these large companies, fat with profit, have shown very
little interest in building a better internet. The telecoms have,
according to NYC Wireless's Dana Spiegel, "been promising for 20 or
30 years, in exchange for getting subsidies and tax credits, to build
broadband infrastructure. We taxpayers have given them everything
they wanted and we've gotten nothing. They promised 15 years ago to
build nationwide fiber infrastructure. They laughed all the way to
the bank. They have been spending all of their money over the past
five to 10 years lobbying for their agenda and not doing a whole lot
to provide better, cheaper broadband. And they've been found to
bypass low-income communities."
What we have here is a market failure. As much as some economists
assure us that the free market will take care of us alland it's true
that the American free market has brought us a wealth of computer and
technology innovationin this crucial area we have fallen way behind.
The European and Asian countries where government and private
industry have worked together, now have faster, cheaper, more
accessible broadband internet.
That helps poor people get jobs. It helps small businesses compete.
And, yes, it helps lonely people find dates. It spreads the benefits
of the internet across the population.
"This is a growing town, very exciting," says Eddan Katz, executive
director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
"There are computers, biotech. And here's a way for the mayor to say,
’This is a tech-friendly city. So part of the incentive of you coming
to downtown, Mr. Businessman, is you have a much cheaper and easier
and lower transaction cost way of getting wireless." There are other
benefits, too, says Katz. "This is an information-rich city. And
information businesses are clean [for the environment]. There are the
new jobs. There's all those things that make this a good thingthese
kinds of companies would be attracted by lower network costs."
The mayor is wise, then, not to promise too much. Bringing more
affordable wireless broadband to New Haven will not erase poverty or
bring an end to crime. Without increased efforts to educate poor and
minority populations (including the elderly) about computers and the
internet, there will remain a sizable digital divide. But in the
meantime we can use municipal wireless as a way to signal to
employersand to ourselvesthat we are active and foresightful, even
when our federal government is not. While Bush continues to lavish
tax breaks on the slow, stodgy telecom industry, we can take a
central conservative insightthat innovation happens fastest on the
local leveland prove it right.
WHAT IS WIFI? A PRIMER R
The operations of computers are as mysterious as the operations of
televisions or airplanes. How do the pictures fly through the air to
my TV screen? How does the airplane stay aloft? I'm not really sure,
to be honest. But if you're willing to suspend disbelief and just
accept that information can be sent over phone lines and through the
air, then I can explain what wireless web is.
First, various people and companies and governments have made
information publicly available on their computers (often on their
home pages), and you can request that that information pop up on your
computer screen. By typing the right keys, you can find the schedule
for the Q bus down Edgewood Ave. You can also send information back
in the other directionso you can order a novel from Barnes and Noble
or a sweater from L.L. Bean, or you can make a reservation at a
hotel. All on your computer. The connections of all these computers,
the world over, is called the internet, or the world wide web, or
just "the net" or "the web."
It used to be that all this information was sent to and fro across
phone lines and cable lines. But the technology exists to beam the
information through the air (with radio waves or X-rays or gamma rays
or somethinghere is where my knowledge breaks down). So whereas you
used to have to plug your computer into a phone line to connect to
these other computers, you can now install a little wireless receiver
in your computer. Then, so long as you are near a router that beams
out an internet signal, you can get information without
wireswirelessly. It's like phones: You once needed to be plugged in,
but now, if you have a mobile phone and are close to a mobile phone
tower beaming a signal, you can talk on a phone without any wires.
Incidentally, most new computers are now made with a wireless chip
built into them; and when those computers are laptops, their owners
can work on the internet anywhere, so long as there is a wireless
signal.
Hence, all those people in coffeeshops.
Dana Spiegel
Executive Director
NYCwireless
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.NYCwireless.net
+1 917 402 0422
Read the Wireless Community blog: http://www.wirelesscommunity.info
--
NYCwireless - http://www.nycwireless.net/
Un/Subscribe: http://lists.nycwireless.net/mailman/listinfo/nycwireless/
Archives: http://lists.nycwireless.net/pipermail/nycwireless/
