WiFi 1.0, like the early Internet, was about grabbing land at whatever cost then charging people to get online.  WiFi 2.0 is a broadband experience that offers people customized rich content.  

By creating a platform that allows various content providers to reach their specific audiences, WiFi 2.0 makes the network itself valuable, worth paying for as a resource, service, or source of entertainment, and worth sponsoring, either by corporations or by the content providers themselves.

Where Wi-Fi 1.0 just gets you to the web, WiFi 2.0 situates you at the center of a community where local businesses, non-profits and local government are all represented.   In Battery Park, for instance, the Parks Department would have access to the network for its own internal communications.   Small wireless web cams would be positioned both for security and commercial purposes.  Tourists could have a digital snap shot taken to be e-mailed home.  The Korean War Memorial (see photo) or the 9/11 Memorial (see photo) could be augmented with interactive content.   While waiting for ferries to the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island, tourists could experience a preview of both places wirelessly through kiosks, panel displays, and other WiFi enabled devices.   A location-based tour of Castle Clinton (see photo), using pictures, sounds and text provided by The New York Historical Society, can help bring the past to life.  The American Café, like other restaurants within the park Hot Spots, could use a Wi-Fi driven solution to deploy a system that would take food orders, handle billing, and help control inventory.

I was always dubious about Wi-Fi Salon due to the surreal technical explanations made by its founder, its small size and lack of real-world experience, and the extensive delays in every step of the project. Ultimately, something closer to kiosks than coverage were erected, and I've never seen any usage numbers.

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.

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

The editorial makes no mention of the fact that first ePath has to raise $150 million in capital. One wonders what the market is for venture capital for muniWiFi deployments given Earthlink's travails. Keyspan Energy, their backhaul partner (they will provide fiber) could well back them. The other partner, Cisco, has at least the gear. Perhaps with the $150 million, once they get it, they will be able to cover a projected 750 square miles, which would come out to 200K a square mile.

You can read the Times article here.

ePath has an infrastructure partner in Cisco, and a fiber backhaul provider in Keyspan Energy, so they come to the table with something. All they need to do now is to raise $150 million dollars to build the network. Nassau / Suffolk will not be providing any funds or committing to purchase any services from ePath. It is all upon them to find the backers willing to take the risk.

As a purveyor of a WiFi Hot Spot network in 17 locations in ten NYC parks in 4 boroughs, WiFi Salon can well attest to the problem that leaves present in terms of providing reliable coverage.

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.

1. Muni Wireless should not be about trying to create yet another network.

2. There is enough infrastructure out there to provide communities with broadband as a shared resource.

3. Creating such shared environments is a software fix — think FON where your wireless router is opened up securely for the use of others while your traffic is secured.

4. It should not look to become the cure all for everything — in some cases, wired solutions will be superior.

5. We should not overburden MuniWiFi with grand expectations and requirements. Let’s be modest, and keep the commitments low. Grand projects are both expensive and unrealistic in terms of expectations on performance, service delivery.

Now I am very sympathetic to this argument. MuniWiFi should be thought of as local, grass roots, as an aggregation and sharing of available resources.

You have your Boingos and your FONs — companies that seek to aggregate routers. Anyone who has ever opened a laptop in a city will see many WiFi networks in the vicinity, some open, some secure. Here is a map of available WiFi networks in NYC created by my CTO Marcos Lara via The Public Internet Project in 2002:

As you can see, even in 2002 there were a lot of networks, but how to get people to share?

How do you incent people to share their bandwidth, and do it securely — of course without running afoul of the local telecoms?

Our vote is to work with BIDs, (Business Improvement Districts), Chambers of Commerce and community groups so that they understand the virtue of creating a common resource in key areas in the community. The collection of access points could be fashioned into a single platform via common interfaces (local portals), router firmware, and backend management, with the need to augment the existing patchwork with new access points.

The solution is not just wireless, as Bob states, but would involve a mix of wired connectivity options as well. Having ADSL2+ lines from Covad, for instance, as strategic backhaul for local WiFi Hot Zones, would for WiFi Salon be a part of the solution —so long as they are amenable to shared connections.

The poster, Alice LaPlante, notes that as a small business person she was disappointed to hear about all the delays.

Here, she hits on how muniWiFi should work — as an amenity for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Create Hot Zones for them. They congregate, dine, shop, build their businesses, hire. A great demographic to pursue.

The consumer play is one thing. The business improvement district play is another.

You can find the Network World Article here.

Earthlink’s new CEO Rolla Hoff said on their Q2 Earnings Report conference call ( a $16.2 million loss) that they won’t be pursuing more muniWiFi business until they can figure out how to make money at it, and would going forward seek deals where the municipality would come in as an anchor tenant to help bootstrap the network.

Perhaps he is now looking for the kind of deals AT+T for instance has with Riverside California, where they will provide city services — police, fire, ambulance, security — in the 4.9 GHz spectrum — and them piggyback muni WiFi at 2.4GHz on top of that. Esme Voss is a big proponent of that model, and it makes sense.

In sum, for muniWiFi to work, the WISP has to have a suite of muni solutions that the local municipality is willing to implement. From that foundation, from that platform, you can layer on a public WiFi network.

The big mistake so far in muniWiFi has been that WISPs have tried to duplicate the cell network and provide universal coverage. WiFi is a different animal. We need to focus on creating WiFi Hot Zones at key locations throughout a community, and not try to cover the whole community indoors and out. Otherwise, we will run into a wall — no, many of them. The deployments and the customer service will be a magnitude more expensive, while user satisfaction will plummet.

Promise people a good strong signal within a limited area, and deliver it, say, in twenty locations in a small city and you have something people will want, especially as more start to actually own a WiFi enabled device.