Seattle City Councilman Jim Compton thinks Seattle is ready to become the most unwired city, with a municipally owned network providing wireless Internet service everywhere. As a model, he pointed to the Click! Network that’s been operating since 1998 in Tacoma, where 11,000 high-speed Internet customers pay $25 to $30 a month to one of three Internet-service providers who partner with the city.
“It would be a huge competitive advantage to the city to have border to border wireless Internet access,” said Compton, who heads the City Council’s technology committee. “Some city is going to do this. It might as well be us,” he said. The task force would specifically consider broadband, Wi-Fi and WiMax technologies.
Seattle, a friendly rival with smaller Portland, has all its libraries unwired. Portland has zero. But Portland does have free WiFi, thanks to the Personal Telco Project.
Portland’s Alternative Weekly, Willamette Week features Personal Telco’s Nigel Ballard in a cover story and his innovative PREN.net that will link Portland State with the hospital on the hill. The city is interested, too. Portland Commissioner Eric Sten is behind a program that would donate free roofspace on public buildings to any wireless ISPs that offers free net access (in some limited form) to the public.
Portland’s library provided zero leadership and would seem to be a source of deep embarrasement for the county. Free WiFi did not come from the city of Portland. Free hotspots were built by the people, for the people. SeattleWireless, and hundreds of grass roots organizations just like them, are providing “defacto” clouds in cities around the world. But they generally lack one thing – a continuous “cloud” of connectivity.
Enter VeriLAN. The private Portland company is stepping into the void, providing city-wide cloud services. Today.
Rates are as low as $12.95/month.
Steven Schroedl, president and CEO of VeriLAN Inc., is providing WiFi service using a Vivato phased array covering the downtown area. It’s fed from WiMax-like gear from Wi-LAN on a tv tower overlooking the city. VeriLANs WiMax service covers 450-square-miles.
Schroedl’s WiFi coverage, on the same tower, spans 840 square miles in the Portland area.
“We work in our own back yard,” said Schroedl, whose company has built a “We’re doing a conservative buildout to make sure we’re still here tomorrow. We want to serve local people, not build it out [nationally] and hope they will come.”
VeriLAN’s service combines a paid-subscription model with free access.
Subscribers who sign up for wireless Internet access at home or at the office can then use their laptops in downtown Portland for no extra charge. VeriLAN is also offering free access to some “community-based content” on the Web, such as the Web sites of the Multnomah County Library, TriMet and Portland’s official city Web site, portlandonline.com.
VeriLAN’s rates are dirt cheap — ranging from $12.95 per month for data download speeds of 128 kilobits per second, to $149 per month for 1.5 megabit per second. VeriLAN also competes on a day-use basis, offering a one-day service for $5.95, versus T-Mobile’s one-day rate of $9.95.
“We want to make a statement that Internet doesn’t cost as much as people think,” said Schroedl.
Entrepreneurs like Steve Schroedl and enthusiasts like PersonalTelco provide real-world examples of city-wide clouds. Brewster Kahle’s Internet Achive, has a simple goal; “Universal Access to All Human Knowledge”. Kahle’s nonprofit organization is providing just that.
Between the vision and the reality is a universe of creative possibilities.
Many cities are building city-wide clouds like Baltimore, Baton Rouge, Boston, Bellevue & Kirkland, Charleston, South Carolina, OneCleveland, LA suburbs, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Datona Beach, Hermosa Beach, Louisville, Long Beach, FreeBeeAtlanta, Wireless Athens and others including the State of Maine, the State of Georgia and the Southeastern United States.
Other large regional clouds include:
- A 600 square mile WiFi Cloud will cover Hermiston, Stanfield, Boardman, Irrigon, Echo and Umatilla Oregon. Seven cities use it for the Oregon Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program. Another seven cities will be added this summer.
- A 40 square mile hotzone around Kennewick uses WiFi on Bonneville Fiber. Benton PUD is working with several ISPs to offer Wi-Fi. Chameleon Technology developed the $300,000 software management system for Benton PUD’s Wi-Fi network. Benton and Franklin PUDs will jointly market their fiber optics networks under a partnership called Broadstream.
- The City of Spokane and Vivato will create a 100-block downtown hotzone, “the nation’s largest city-wide wireless network,” to support city services and boost local economic development with public access Wi-Fi.
- Oregon’s VeriLAN recently switched on the first commercial 802.16a-like service feeding their Portland Vivato antenna and other connections beyond 465 square mile Multnomah County.
- Nextel and Flarion serves 823 square mile Wake County, including Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill with 1 Mbps broadband everywhere. Flarion also provides Washington DC with a broadband cloud.
- Garland, Texas claims the largest mobile mesh network in the world. They also use MeshNetworks’ technology. Mesh networking has also been deployed in Baton Rouge and other communities in the South.
- Medford uses MeshNetworks’ broadband solution. The largest city in Southern Oregon at 70,000, it has approximately 150 police officers and 75 fire personnel.
- Ottawa Wireless has a wireless zone that’s 70 city blocks, with plans to cover the rest of the city by mid-2004. They use Proxim s recently introduced ORiNOCO AP-4000 tri-band access point and Proxim’s Tsunami MP.11a for backhaul.
- Louisville Kentucky has a metro-area network powered by Navini’s Ripwave system. Phase 1 will cover approximately 75 square miles using five towers for $30/month mobilized broadband. Phase 2, in 2004, is expected to cover about 85% of the city. US Wireless Online, which is building the network, says each cell antenna site cost about $45,000 to set up and it can put together a network of 10 cell sites to serve 30,000 customers for less than $500,000. Jefferson County covers 375 square miles.
- A Navini non-line-of-sight network covers about 5,000 square miles South Texas. Clients get “wireless DSL” using indoor USB clients and 500kbps-1Mbps speed.
- A 4G War in Sydney pits Navini and Arraycomm.
DailyWireless has more on First Commercial 802.16a Switched On, Portland’s City Mesh, Happy Town, MAN with a Plan, Electronic Parking Meters, Mesh Projects.
