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That's always been the dream of public Wi-Fi:   That it would put poor and rural communities on the global grid, and give them the skills they need to compete and even live in this world.  Thus far however, the results have been disappointing.    Too early -- just not enough devices, and very clumsy about finding you networks and logging you on.   Poor network performance --   very limited range of 150-300ft, unstable connections, poor network management -- the tools needed to be developed.  Then there are all the technical limitations that are endemic to operating in an open, unlicensed spectrum at low power.  Other networks interfere.  Doesn't penetrate foliage, or walls.  Thus the early business models that relied upon anyone -- users, municipalities -- paying for this all failed.  Who would pay for the above?  Google of course has been focused on ad supported public Wi-Fi, but that takes networks that work and devices that are Wi-Fi friendly.  No traffic, no ad revenue.

But even now as various muniwireless projects are shuttering, because the network cost far more and performed far worse than expected, new devices like the iPhone are starting to drive demand for Wi-Fi networks, and new Wi-Fi networking technologies are now making possible at last to have 'good-enough' networks, ones that could indeed provide enough in  public amenities and revenue streams to actually  cost justify the building of such community Wi-Fi networks.

Taking a look at matters all together, from the current state of antenna technology, to what Wi-Fi network managing and monitoring tools that are now available, to the flood of consumer-friendly Wi-Fi enabled devices in the pipeline to Web 2.0 (dynamic, interactive, content driven) functionality being now implemented on community portals, to what we have been hearing in the market as we speak to BIDs (Business Improvement Districts), the time for community Wi-Fi is finally arriving.

That is great news for local businesses --  community Wi-Fi and the community web portals that come with them will make those local business much more visible locally and on the internet. 

That is also great news for those who can't afford access.  The Digital Divide leaves the poor and the rural off the grid.  It renders them information-poor and less employable.   It leaves too our nation at a great disadvantage as we compete with the many countries around the world where the internet is much more available, much faster and much cheaper.

The best news is that we are at an early phase in the evolution into the world of pervasive computing, the world of the wireless web.   Devices will become ever cheaper and ubiquitous.  Witness what One Laptop Per Child is trying to do, create a $100 Wi-Fi enabled laptop to bring the web to children globally.   What should be the dream for this country?  Should it be any less so?

We see Wi-Fi renewing communities by connecting them both to the web and to the local web of their community via the web portal.   We see the community portals within the Wi-Fi hot zones encouraging people to buy local.   We see local citizens bringing arts, cultural, civic, and historical information to the local portal to share.

The devices and networks, after five long years, are finally arriving.  We are fast approaching a platform that can support the dream that we began with, that Wi-Fi can renew communities by bringing them the Internet, but localized.

 

With the world going broadband and wireless, and with the web becoming pervasive and social, with hyperlocal content and advertising and location-based services now being enabled through the geocoding of information, or through GPS, business improvement districts (BIDs) in towns and cities everywhere have in potential a rich new marketing and communications platform for local businesses.

What BIDs generally need to do though, to meet this opportunity, is to develop a set of best practices in  web site design, digital marketing, telecom, and so forth.  Today I will just discuss what could be done with BID web sites in this new environment.

The Local BID Portal

Typically, when you look at a BID web site, you will a membership directory, usually searchable by business type.    You will often see a BID map as well.   You will sometimes see a map with the BID members located on it.   You rarely see the BID map with the members located on a map dynamically -- that is, as something you can click on to get a menu, hours, phone number, web site, etc.

This kind of functionality is of course available on Google, Yahoo, or Citysearch.   Given the direction coding for the web is going, every BID could have such functionality on their sites.

Since most BID sites were built say more than a year ago, most don't have 'dynamic content' -- that is local news feeds, local event feeds, content aggregation tools.    Instead, content must be 'posted' by their marketing person or webmaster or by the company that designed the site.   

With the web now feed driven and modular, local BIDs can now have portals designed to capture all relevant information about the neighborhood and its local businesses.  With the content auto-refreshing, the site becomes more 'visible' more interesting to visit and much easier to manage.

The next step after creating a feed driven local portal is to give locals the ability to post their own blogs, photos, videos about the neighborhood and its local businesses.   

How valuable would it be to have locals aggregating local content for the BID portal?  When people come to the BID's community web portal, they will read what the locals have to say before anyone else.

As we speak with our clients, we find more often than not, they would want the comments and user submitted content to be reviewed first.   The good news is that this functionality is easy to implement.

Next:    The Local BID Portal in a Wi-Fi Hot Zone





 

Mediabistro's MediaCircus came to town, holding a two day event May 20th-May 21st at Skylight NYC {275 Hudson St) that addressed how web journalism / publishing will continue to evolve

As web sites become modular aggregations of feeds
As the web grows pervasive through wireless technologies
As information is geotagged
As knowledge production becomes over more open source / community generated
As the social web is harnessed for promotion, production and distribution

Finding how to create value within that web economy is a challenge for old media and for anyone who ever gave a thought to becoming a blogger/web journalist.

The speakers at the event demonstrated that where ever this is going, there is still room for talent, especially if that talent happens to be the ability to explain where we are now and extrapolate a bit ahead to where we are going both eloquently and succinctly.

We were providing the Wi-Fi for the event, but it became much more than that.   I spent the last part of Day One and all of Day Two.

I particularly liked what Steven Johnson of Outside.in had to say about community generation of hyperlocal content.

I met Laura Trouby their founder after about seven years of e-mails -- I 've been subscribing.  It's a great organization she's built.  As well organized and presented conference as I have attended.

Convergence at last!    Wi-Fi Salon's long time goal has been to put a Web 2.0 interface on public Wi-Fi and create  Wi-Fi 2.0.   This Wi-Fi is not about access, but aggregated and community generated local content available on any device within a neighborhood or business district Hot Zone or over the web on a local community portal.   That all had to wait though until the devices came, and led by the iPhone, here they come!  It also had to await the arrival of 'good enough' networks.   3G anyone?  Or public Wi-Fi that works.

Wi-Fi is the internet localized, and so a perfect platform for community publishing, for highly local multimedia services and experiences.    We very much look forward to our next event with Mediabistro.

Nice to have an interesting contrarian position. Craig Mattias looks at the current bad news on muniwireless — read Earthlink — and takes the long view. WiFi will come because there is no other alternative. WiFi will come to complement the cellular network because WiFi is just better at delivering local wireless broadband, and is a global standard.

What could well happen, especially in an urban environment, is that public WiFi will become the victim of WiFi’s over all success. At Union Square, NYC for instance, where we have one of our parkwifi locations, WiFi Salon has detected 215 other nearby networks. They interfere with our coverage, and affect our QoS, and of course interfere with each other. This is open spectrum, so that’s the way it goes.

Advances in technology will increase performance/QoS, but there are real limitations when it comes to RF interference.

Covad has been great. New York City is a challenge, the parks are an even greater challenge, but we got it done. We got working DSL into 17 park locations and ADSL2+ into Columbus Circle, The Sheep Meadow, Washington Square Park, Summerstage, with Union Square pending and other locations also upgradable.

What does that mean for the user? Free high speed WiFi, with the capacity to support multimedia and a good number of simultaneous users. ADSL2+ tripled our capacity. Visit any of our free WiFi Hot Spots here.

Here is the rest of the press release, also available as a google search here.

, Wayport Among Providers That Rely on Covad's T1 and DSL to Connect Hotspots in Airports, Parks, and Other Public Areas

New York City is the Media Capital of the World. Its destiny is to become the wireless digital media capital of the world.

What this town needs right now is a public space that is awash in broadband WiFi. Lincoln Center Plaza now has WiFi. Imagine what the world’s largest performing arts center will now do with WiFi in their plaza.

Our parkwifi Hot Spots are being all outfitted with ADSL2+ to handle the demands of public wireless multimedia.

With such capacity, our locations will be venues where leading edge wireless digital arts and cultural content can be broadcast, and new immersive wireless experiences can be staged.

WiFi Salon believes there should be venues i.e. Salons where NYC’s arts and cultural community can present to the public and where technology and media companies can offer what a wireless world will look like.

Well, we all know the winning model for muniWiFi is not here yet. Here is the current litany of pain from Fast Company: Fast Cities Struggle to Go Wireless

People are discovering that WiFi cannot compete side by side with the telcos to provide universal broadband access over a large geographic area with anything like the QoS that people expect. Cell gives people universal coverage. They want their muniWiFi to provide it, especially if they are being asked to pay for it.

Mesh would be the way to go, except the attenuation (degradation of signal) between hops makes the technology — so far — not nearly as robust and cost effective as it needs to be. Earthlink/Philly/Tropos is what is cited as the main example.

What everyone seemed to forget as they were laying out their plans for a wireless municipal network is that WiFi by FCC regulation, and given where it is on the spectrum, doesn’t penetrate well — into buildings, through trees, down the hall, etc. People also forgot that this is open, unlicensed spectrum, subject to interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, baby monitors, fish tanks (Wi Fi can’t penetrate water), other WiFi networks, etc.

WiFi itself was created by people who took the thin slice of free or junk spectrum alloted by the FCC and went with it well beyond what anyone could have anticipated. That said, there are continued limitations with WiFi that correspond to laws of physics. More robust spectrum at a higher power level is what is really needed.

In the meantime, let’s take what WiFi does well — provide local broadband connectivity. Let’s create a local wireless broadband experience within a neighborhood public space or commercial corridor.

Forget city networks. Too big, too bold, wrong paradigm for the spectrum you have been alloted. Dig “community wells” rather than trying to lay all the pipes necessary for “indoor plumbing.” Don’t go toe to toe with cable and the local telco and try to be the third player. You will lose because you will have a lot of the headaches and overhead of a telco — the in-house wired infrastructure, a large sales, marketing and customer service force — and not nearly the means given WiFi’s limitations to deliver a service that can compete in terms of price and quality, not with DSL prices continuing to drop, and I daresay $99 voice, cable and internet triple plays to be had at internet speeds far far higher than what WiFi would provide indoors.

We should try to instead create Community WiFi, as opposed to Consumer WiFi. Establish Hot Zones that are highly local, not mobile or municipal. WiFi Salon believes WiFi should be established the community’s centers — the schools, libraries, parks, public squares, the business districts. If you try to bring something to everyone everywhere, most certainly you will spend too much and still come up short because in the end you won’t be able to deliver enough to individual homes and offices. As a location-based service in key areas — well that is another matter.

The Wall Street Journal today had an interesting article on one potential business model that would support MuniWiFi: Advertising.

Here’s the link:).

The article discusses how the ad supported muniwifi model has not taken hold because large advertisers cannot buy ads in bulk or across large areas because WiFi is a very local and small scale thing. Each municipality is a separate negotiation. If you are selling or promoting a national brand, that is a problem.

One potential answer, according to the article, is to aggregate the locations, get a hundred providers to sign up with your ad service, and then turn around to the major brands and sell that space. This is the JiWire strategy. They are a WiFi directory service, a provider of WiFi security solutions, and now in conjunction with Microsoft a provider of advertising network services.

The value proposition is this: You are a Wireless Service Provider (WISP). You run their ad platform on your network. They have many dozens of networks signed up. They are able thus to grab ad dollars from national advertisers because they now have the reach and scale necessary, and they split the revenue with the WISP. Free WiFi, ad supported.

Will this work? I would say that unless this otherwise top-down platform allows also for a means by which to create highly local ads, and support user generated content for reviews, recommendations, new locales, this alone will just will not work for (free) muni WiFi.

A director from Digitas noted that people would be very likely to tune when watching the obligatory ten second video that would pay for the free WiFi. Maybe so, but the medium — broadband wireless internet — is going have advertising possibilities — interactive, location-based, IP based — that this re-purposing of desktop ad technology just lacks, and which is now, as noted, real tired.

We respectfully submit that WiFi’s strength is that it is the internet, localized. Local content, services, and yes, advertisements. Advertising is relevant to the extent that it is actionable. With WiFi, the customer is the point of sale, and a WiFi Zone and a Commercial Zone can be one and the same.

Integrate local advertising with a local interactive map, geolocate the content, enable user created content. Keep it hyper local, aggregate. The Long Tail, if you will.

We believe we are a ways from where you can show the right ROI to local businesses using traditional ad placement sales: How many devices / users would you have to have on a network to create enough sales to even pay for a $135 ad for a pizzeria. The question is, where do we see the right density of devices in use at WiFi Hot Spots —2008? 2010? — to command the ad rates needed to sustain the local WiFi network? Microsoft and JiWire have their projections. More revenue sources beyond advertising is required for now.

We believe strongly that lighting up a commercial corridor and seeding the area with wireless screens, kiosks, handhelds, and providing a local interactive map will create advertising solutions that will be all the more effective for being part of an “immersive” wireless experience. Do large brands even have a place here?

KQED emailed me a link to an interesting story on how a consortium of four companies, headed by Cisco and IBM, are planning to build a 37 town muni WiFi network in Silicon Valley.

I still want to know about device density i.e. how many WiFi enabled devices are there now, how many will there be in three years. Device density is crucial. That is the pool of potential users.

It’s a $100 million dollar experiment for them. I like their chances more than I did the ill-fated Cometa. That consortium of Intel, AT+T and IBM went through $40 million back in 2003 in the attempt to create a wholesale backbone/backend for WiFi. No devices then, some now.

wrote a little piece on WiFi Salon’s upgrade of the parkwifi network through ADSL2+ lines from Covad.

Small point — we are in ten parks (not 17 — that’s the number of locations).

We are glad that we were able to provide a leading edge service like Covad’s ADSL2+ to New Yorks park goers as part of our free parkwifi networkWiFi. We have about tripled capacity at Sheep Meadow and Columbus Circle. That means we can support three times the users and much more in the way of video streaming. Washington Square, Union Square, Summerstage and The Delacorte / South Great Lawn are also now in process.

We are now seeking to populate the portals with local multimedia content from media companies, arts and cultural institutions, from The NYC Parks Department and various parks conservancies, and public entities.