Municipal Wireless: An Idea Whose Time Has Come For Chicago?
Sometimes it's funny how events overlap. Just this week, I started having a conversation with Gary and a few other people I know about the idea of a municipally sponsered wireless service for Rogers Park. My thought was that if there is a perfect test ward for this concept, the 49th has got to be it. I was planning a quiet Saturday hunkered down in front of my computer researching whether Chicago was currently studying this idea, what other cities in the US and around the world have done, and the arguments pro and con.
Well, it turns out the city has been studying it and more. If fact, the city is way ahead of me. Chicago is opening a proposal process to procure wireless communications services that will cover the entire city of Chicago. Here is the full story from the Chicago Tribune to get you started.
There are many, many threads to a discussion about municipal wireless. Over the coming days and weeks, I plan to share with you resources that may nurture the conversation. I hope we can share the space of this blog to discuss the ramifications of this very important initiative.
Here are a few resources I plan to consult soon to start getting my head around this issue. If you know of others, please share them in the comments, or send them to rogersparkreview@hotmail.com
Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless
Support blog for readers of: Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless
Heartland Institute
Here is a post on the subject by the Trib's technology blogger:
Steve Johnson
Hypertext - A Chicago Tribune Web log
Originally posted: February 17, 2006 Chicago Wi-Fi: Keep it cheap
Assuming technological competence, whether Chicago's wireless plan will be at all useful depends most on price. If whoever wins the (theoretical) contract wants to charge you $5 every time you use the service, forget it. We might as well set up a network of hollow cans attached to Chicago's telephone poles.
If, however, they come up with something like a reasonable monthly fee -- say, $9.95 and/or $1 per session for higher-income users down to free for those who don't earn much -- then we may be on to something. Internet access is already essential to full participation in society, and it will only become more so. We are approaching the point where providing it is a civic obligation.
It would take a company specializing in metro wireless -- and a city administration immune to the entreaties of the big utilities for whom Internet access fees are an enormous profit center -- to pull this off. For it to mean anything at all, it has to be a competitor to the SBCs and Comcasts of the world, not a subsidiary of one of theirs set up to control the burgeoning wireless field.
We are, of course, a long way away from this. But let's keep in mind, as proposals come in, that initial price is not the primary consideration. Long-term competitive prospects are.
9 Comments:
Well, I don't want to be a wet blanket, because I really like the concept and the potential for better access for all and blah blah blah. But I also think we need to be realistic about the political struggle that will be involved.
Take a look what the City of New Orleans tried to implement post Katrina...
...and what Bell South did to punish them...
...that's nothing though. Bell South and others are also busy sharpening some really big knives in the face of these initiatives...
Paradise -
I didn't mean to sound so defeatist. You seem to be ahead of the curve on this issue and I appreciate your comments here. I agree with you that this is probably something worth fighting for if it is done right...
(...I'm still trying to get a grip on what the definition of right might be...)
Here is another article to inform us on the state of competition in this space...
Steve Johnson of the Tribune wrote:
> Assuming technological competence ...
This is a BIG assumption. Wiring Chicago for wireless is a big project, bigger than anything Chicago's IT shop has attempted. I have no confidence and no reason for confidence that my home town's IT brain trust can pull it off. For God's sake, we can't even get our libraries or schools online properly.
It's big and it's risky. The way things move in Chicago, and the way this technology evolves, the gear they will attempt to role out will be antiquated before the role out is complete. It's TOO risky for a public project.
It's not a priority. Our teachers are buying supplies for their classrooms.
Realistically, all that will happen is the City will lease space on our utility poles for the wireless antennas, similar to what we did with cable. Anyone who thinks wiring Chicago for wireless is a grand idea needs to carefully study the story of how we got wired for cable TV, the promises made and the deal we ended up with when our City Council got done with it.
I don't want to buy internet access from my home town. I want my home town to do a better job of the providing existing services. Our public schools are operating at a deficit. Our public transportation system is going broke. If we were on top of things and we had a bunch of surplus cash lying around, maybe. You have to ask yourself, if this is such a great idea, why isn't SBC or AT&T or Verizon doing it? If it is too risky for them, it is WAY too risky as a public project.
Here's a press release from the City of Chicago web site. The link to it is on the splash page. It is an unusual press release in that it is a City press release which is a newspaper article, the reverse of the usual practice, writing a newspaper article from a press release. It is also unusual for having been writen by a free-lancer as opposed to a staff writer.
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Phone:
E-mail:
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
City-wide Wi-Fi Closer Than You Think
By Ted Pinkus
Imagine yourself sitting with your laptop computer fully hooked up to the Web through high-speed broadband on the lawn in Grant Park or in the stands at Soldier Field or in your backyard in Rogers Park or in the back of an RV or riding a CTA bus to work.
Better yet, imagine your own small business office PC similarly connected without wires that must be linked to an expensive cable service land line, and find it usable in any room, any time.
That fantasy might become a reality this year, thanks to the energies of Chicago's Mister Connectivity, Chris O'Brien, and his high powered team. He's presenting his final recommendations to the City Council a week from today. On Monday, EarthLink Inc. finalized a 10-year contract to provide wireless Internet service across Philadelphia, making it the largest U.S. city to date to ink plans to build a wireless Internet network.
Wi-Fi essentially permits any computer user, with a special chip or card inserted into his machine, to log onto the Internet on a wireless basis. The connection is via a transmission box/antenna that sends and receives signals and serves any enabled computer within a 200-foot radius.
Beyond the arcane
Up to now, this service has been limited to local Starbucks, McDonald's and other fast-food emporiums (mainly arcane venues such as Chicago's Bean Addiction Cafe, the Bourgeois Pig and Rain Dog Books & Cafe) plus 79 public library branches here. All these are called "hot spots" -- places where proprietors and municipalities have already provided free or low-cost wireless access to the Web.
No major city in the world has citywide coverage. Taipei (population 2.6 million), capital of Taiwan, probably will be the first. It has 3,300 wireless "access points" (transmitter/antenna units) that cover half the city's 276 square kilometers, and Taiwan consulate official Lishan Chang in Chicago states that 100 percent coverage will be completed by June. It's being installed at a cost of $93 million by Q-Ware Systems, Inc., which will recoup the cost by a usage fee of $12.50 per month per subscriber.
The final plan O'Brien will present next Tuesday calls for an RFP (request for proposals) to be issued in coming weeks to dozens of equipment suppliers (e.g., Motorola, Tropos and similar companies) and service providers (e.g., T-Mobile) that can handle installation and network maintenance.
While the project is daunting in scope, it's extremely familiar ground to this 37-year-old techie. He has been serving as Chicago's chief information officer for the past six years, responsible for just about everything that clicks or blinks, including all 15,000 PC's at City Hall and 200 remote locations, the city Web site, its e-commerce system and even its emergency management system.
He estimates it will take three months to have the RFP's circulated and returned, and another three months for review before contract award -- which probably will go to a consortium of equipment makers and service providers.
Installation, in which the access unit, about the size of a hard-cover book, will be mounted on city-owned locations like lamp posts, could then take place fairly rapidly, probably before year-end.
He sees the move as a win/win for everyone. "The user will be free to access broadband service anywhere within city limits, indoors and out, at very low cost," he says. "The city will provide an important convenience at no cost to the taxpayer. And the project will mean good business for the suppliers."
Technology makes it possible
If the upside is so obvious, why didn't all this happen earlier? "Simply because," O'Brien tells me, "the technology hadn't matured to the point where we had confidence it could serve an entire city this large. Now we know it has."
The project culminates several months of effort by the two City Council members who spearheaded the idea, Finance Committee Chairman Ed Burke and Ald. Marge Laurino, chairwoman of the Economic, Capital and Technology Development Committee.
Helping mightily, she says, to make it all happen has been a special task force including six other aldermen, four O'Brien staffers and pro bono volunteers Nicole Friedman, Scott Goldstein, David Weinstein, Brian Imus, Lynn Daniel, James Yu and Turner Lee Nicol. You can thank them when you finally can get on-line without wires, anywhere, any time.
Ted Pincus is a finance professor at DePaul and an independent communications consultant and journalist.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Trib and Sun-Times bit on a City media blitz.
SBC has a lock on this contract. Check out the campaign disclosure database. SBC has literally MILLIONS in campaign contributions, including generous support for our Mayor and most Aldermen. The Mayor's brother is a former President of SBC. The RFP process described is a sham.
"No cost to the taxpayer." Have you noticed that EVERY project is no cost to the taxpayer these days? Millennium Park was supposed to be no cost to the taxpayer - it would pay for itself thanks to the parking garage underneath.
This press blitz from the City, next week's presentation to the City Council, and the RFP process are softening the proverbial ground for granting SBC access to our utility poles. The discussion of pricing is amusing. Recall when our City elected officials were hammering out our cable TV plan, they spouted all sorts of nonsense about how their plan would guarantee low rates. Their idea of competition was to carve the City up into 5 districts and give a cable company a monopoly in each. The City does not care about the retail cost, they only care about the lease payments from SBC. The lease will create a revenue stream, and the revenue stream will be bonded out within a year or two. We will end up not with an enhanced cash position but in debt, just like we did with the Skyway, just like we did with the bus shelters, just like we always do.
You are right Hugh. That press release is a doozy. But at least I have all the names now.
I have a lot questions about how this is all going to work, especially how it is going to be funded, both the implementation and the ongoing service.
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