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Unwiring Long Beach

Long Beach, California is reportedly “the largest city in the United States to deploy free wireless Internet access”. Mayor, Beverly O’Neill, will officially unveil their free public Wireless network at a grand opening this Friday, January 10th. Free Long Beach Portals in the Downtown Hot Zone and Airport Wireless District will be available to the public at no charge.

Long Beach is using the Vernier Networks IS 6000 system to manage its access points and control wireless subscribers. The router connects their weather-proof Intermec MobileLAN 2100 wireless access points, using 11 MBps Wifi. The weather-proof 2100 AP is designed to withstand harsh environments. Its NEMA4/IP54 case has heater options.

The wireless “cloud” extends to various restaurants, cafes, department stores, and hotels.

The Largest City? Terry Schmidt of nycwireless.net says, “The New York Times gives the network a more accurate description. ‘The project will initially provide wireless service to a four-block area around the city’s convention district along Pine Street, but there are plans to extend the network to other Long Beach neighborhoods including the marina and the airport, said Bruce Mayes, the acting technology officer for the Long Beach Economic Development Bureau.’.

“Four blocks isn’t that much, so I would wouldn’t call it the largest wireless city. Didn’t the city in Georgia have a larger coverage area?”

Sam adds: I think Terry is right on both counts. Here’s a roundup of other “City Clouds”.

A roof-mounted point-to-point U-NII-band radio provides an 8-Mbps link to Pine Avenue, where the receiver is cross connected to one of three Intermec access points. The access points, mounted on light posts, relay the signal along the street.

The network can support as many as a couple of hundred simultaneous users, says Color Broadband president Sean LeMons. Users share about 2Mbps, but that could be bumped up to 8Mbps in case of congestion. As it is, the 10 to 20 users who log on each day for periods ranging from a few mintutes to an hour are getting the full 2Mbps.

The Long Beach Economic Development Bureau plans to defray the costs of maintaining the network by selling ad space at the portal site to local merchants.

Besides its broadband service, a number of features have been developed specifically to give the visitor a chance to become familiar with Downtown Long Beach. The system incorporates a specialized web portal that automatically loads when the visitor first logs on.

The portal features links, specific to Long Beach events and Long Beach websites. Utilizing the LongBeachOnLine.net database, it is designed to give local businesses and organizations (with a web presence) an opportunity to reach an audience that is already in the area. The portal also incorporates a “real time” events calendar which will allow merchants and organizations to list upcoming, events, sales, specials, entertainment or other services.

“It’s just a convenience for business people, travelers or conventioneers who want to go to (downtown) Long Beach for dining,’ said Chet Yoshizaki, manager of the city’s Economic Development Bureau. Yoshizaki said that most of the equipment and services needed were donated by private companies, including G-site, Intermec, Vernier Networks and Color Broadband. He said he expects the city’s annual cost for running the network to be about $4,000.

“Our goal was to make it easy for unsophisticated wireless users to access the network in a public place without any hassle or confusion,” said Tom Paradise, IT consultant for the project.

Integrated System integrates both access control and wireless connectivity and is designed for tactical WLAN deployments. The system ensures seamless roaming across all access points — even across subnets. The platform deploys, manages, and enforces security at the wireless network edge. In a single stand-alone device, the IS 6000 provides the functionality for wireless network configuration and management, and enforces network access policies.

“Long Beach city officials have tapped into the idea of convenient wireless Internet access for its business community and patrons of local shops and hotels,” said Doug Klein, CEO at Vernier Networks. “By managing every access point, Vernier makes it possible for the city’s mobile users to experience seamless wireless connectivity when accessing the Internet. The opportunity to play an integral role in the successful implementation of the city’s wireless network was in fact quite remarkable.”

In deference to local business owners worried about Internet surfers hogging up tables for extended periods of time, Yoshizaki said users will be able to use the downtown Wi-Fi network for only an hour a day. Access at the airport and Convention Center will be limitless.

A soft opening of the public wireless network has been available since November 15. Long Beach is the first city on the West coast to have an offering of free wireless Internet access. The city’s next project is to deploy a wireless hot spot at Long Beach airport.

Long Beach Mayor Beverly O’Neill will officially unveil the public WLAN at a grand opening event on Friday, January 10 at 10:00 a.m. The festivities will include invited guests, Melanie Fallon, community development director, Chet Yoshizaki, manager of economic development bureau, City Council members and various local press representatives. Laptops and access to the WLAN will be available for attendees to demonstrate how it works.

A log-in page automatically appears after users start their Web browsers. Users supply their e- mail addresses to log in, which Gigliotti said are only used for administrative purposes. He said the companies involved hope to recoup some of their investment through advertisements on the downtown Web portal he operates, to which users are automatically taken after logging in.

The Web site will also promote downtown businesses with links to local news, entertainment and dining, he said.

A growing number of cities are exploring the idea of installing such networks in downtown areas, include San Francisco, Seattle, Jacksonville, Fla., and Lodi.

The New York Times reports

“The Bay Area Wireless Regional Network in San Francisco this week plans to switch on its first experimental access point atop San Bruno Mountain, in the southern part of the city. The network should make the Internet available over roughly an eight-mile radius to users with special antennas.
The Bay Area wireless group is a hobbyist experiment, run by just four volunteers with a donated Internet connection, but the project illustrates the low costs of wireless networks based on the industry’s 802.11 wireless standard.
According to Tim Pozar, a radio engineer who is one of the leaders of the experiment, the group will spend about $2,000 to install the system and will increase capacity by adding low-cost antennas.”